Chief executives and senior teams, hear this: pulling the trigger and going before your business is ready will punch a massive black hole in your world for at least three years. Any face or money you save at the start will be chump change compared with the remediation you’ll need to put in place. Heads will end up rolling; maybe even yours.
I’ve been looking at a great concept called F***-Up Nights (you can find a website all about it). This is a group – operating in hundreds of cities all over the world – where tech and business people meet up in order to talk openly about things they’ve...messed up, and how they wish they’d done things differently. From what I hear the nights are funny, emotional sometimes, painful, and incredibly instructive. The idea is that learning from others’ painful experiences helps us all move forward.
In our sector, where the stakes are so very high for clients and advisers, I’d love to start one of these nights with the express intention of ensuring no clients ever have to go through what people with holdings on Aviva and Cofunds have had to. But there’s no point. No one will come, lest they give a rival some sort of competitive advantage.
And we go round the sun again, and we never learn.
Mergers and acquisitions (and listings)
The platform market used to be sclerotic: jammed up and impossible to do much with. Then, after Elevate and Cofunds changed hands in the past couple of years, there was a sudden flurry of activity.
Quilter, Transact, Nucleus and AJ Bell all managed successful initial public offerings – although adverse markets have hit the first three since floating, with only Transact above the IPO waterline at the time of writing. AJ Bell has had a great start, but it’s a long old race.
Away from floats, a long-term parlour game called ‘Guess who’s going to buy Alliance Trust Savings’ came to an end, with Interactive Investor doing the deed, though all is yet to work its way through.
I think this is a great fit – Interactive Investor is also a flat-fee champion and has some chops on difficult integrations as a result of the TD Direct merger. How the ATS advised book fits the second-largest direct-to-consumer platform in the UK is a different matter. Whatever happens, I hope very much that ATS stays around in one form or another.
