Summary
The seventeenth Meeting of Minds Winning Advisers took place on Thursday 18 October at Pennyhill Park, Bagshot, Surrey. This document summarises the key issues raised in the topics discussed during the roundtables that took place on the day.
A Meeting of Minds Winning Advisers is a biannual strategic forum organised by Owen James which brings together the owner managers of financial advisory firms who typically have £150M - £200M funds under management and between 3 and 20 RIs. They represent independently spirited firms prospering post RDR.
The agenda examined all aspects of their business, focusing on productivity and profitability, as well as overarching trends within the industry as a whole. This session is for those firms based in the southern half of the UK.The agenda encompassed investment trends and the geopolitical climate impacting them as well as the day to day issues faced by those running these businesses.
To find out more about taking part, please contact Emily Landless-Hill at Owen James: emilylandlesshill@owenjamesgroup.com or you can contact her at 01483 861 334.
This Report
The Roundtable sessions were facilitated by:
- Richard Burrows, Independent Consultant
- John Chapman, Owen James
- Richard Clarke, Independent Consultant
- Simon Harrington, PIMFA
- Nick French, MAD Consulting
- James Goad, Owen James
- Paul Miles, Silverbacks Consulting
- Roderic Rennison, Rennison Consulting
We are very grateful for the time and energy they have expended on making A Meeting of Minds Winning Advisers a success and hope you will consider this report an interesting, thought-provoking and accessible read.
The Sponsors
We would like to thank all our sponsors who make these Meetings possible; their motivation for taking part is threefold:
• To be, and to be seen as being supportive of the industry
• To understand the stresses and strains being placed on the industry and, where possible, respond to them
• To talk openly with these business leaders with a view to ensuring that their businesses are strategically aligned.
The Findings
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Buying, selling, building or retiring – you need a plan! October 2018
It is likely that you are all so busy coping with the day to day that your next step is little more than a pipe dream. So maybe this is a good time to sit back and think about writing that Plan. This is really a game of two halves! There is the conversation around buying and building and then the conversation around selling and retiring.
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Personal finance goes digital. How ready are you? - October
Personal financial management is on the cusp of a fundamental transformation. For many years, the traditional face-to-face advisory model has provided a service to the minority of the population who can afford it. A confluence of factors including regulatory change and technological progress are now combining to enable a new means of customer engagement. With banking services slowly but surely moving towards being mobile-first, digital innovators have wealth management in their sights as an industry that is ripe for disruption. Meanwhile, a shift in pensions responsibility from the corporate to the individual and the rise of the gig economy has put retirement affordability, and more generally personal financial wellbeing firmly in the spotlight. While traditional financial advice remains unattainable for most, a suite of digital products and services are being developed to fill the gap. Disrupt or be disrupted- attempts to create new, viable business models for the digital age will flounder unless people and organisations are willing to disrupt themselves.
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Powering Your Business – placing the adviser at the heart of the value chain
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that most of our delegates (71% in fact) use an in-house CIP approach for their investment portfolios; followed by 38% using a third party CIP approach, but maybe it is time to have a good look at all the options out there.
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Preparing for growth: What can we learn from global high growth advisory firms?
The Advisor Benchmark study aims to understand global best practices in financial advice around the world, to help firms deliver better services and outcomes for clients. Leveraging data from the 2018 Benchmark study of over 1,300 advisory firms, this session discussed findings that relate to the characteristics of higher growth firms, relative to their lower growth peers.
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Residential property as a wealth planning vehicle
Direct property investing is hugely popular in the UK, Whether people buying a home to live in, or as part of a Buy-to-Let portfolio. The average house price in England and Wales has risen by over 300% since 1996.There is £1 trillion housing equity held by the over 65s however, recent changes to taxes, notably increased stamp duty as well as more stringent taxation on property income for Buy-To-Let investments made such investments less attractive for some investors. These changes, coupled with other trends such as online investing, and the emergence of crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending, has led to a flurry of new players in the market offering “Alternative options to invest in residential property”. While direct property investment is a market most advisers don’t get involved with, there are a lot of new opportunities for investors. Shouldn’t you be helping your clients navigate through this new landscape. Equity Release as a brand has a poor historical reputation due to the way it has been sold and who it has been sold to. But given a lot of wealth is locked up in residential property, how can adviser help clients assess Equity Release as an option for cash flow and financial planning ? What will Brexit mean for UK residential property?
