A firm with no limits

And to Evolution 2022, the Verve Group’s smash hit half-day event, designed to explore how we can evolve financial services and shift (shove) it further towards the present day. 

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It focused on three areas: talent, business and technology, and like all good shows, asked for audience participation.

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One of the questions we were asked to discuss with each other was "What would a financial planning firm with no limitations look like?"

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Good one. 

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The idea of having no FCA to answer to was naturally got the wheels spinning… imagine a suitability report that was 8 pages instead of 20, imagine if it was 1, imagine if we just communicated in emojis.

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I’m joking. No one said that. 

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But I was wondering whether things were getting a little too reactive. 

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Some clients like the formality of the small print; they have no intention of reading it, but like the look of something that feels as if it’s been handled by a grey, bespectacled lawyer; it’s comforting. If you take away that, what have you got? Something that might feel a little… dodgy?

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Of course, there’s a balance to be had. But I don’t think the answer is to be all loosy goosy for the sake of it. 

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The answer, I think, is options. Send the funky young ones a link to a hidden url where they can see for themselves what’s what, if they really want to. Or print the yellow pages version and post it to the old lady clients with ‘fingers like sausages’ (sorry but I love this description) who prefer to read things offline. 

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Or rewrite everything so people can understand them. A few years ago a lawyer rewrote Instagram’s privacy policy so kids could understand what they were signing up to. 

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This kind of personalisation is right up the Consumer Duty’s street – and it doesn’t get more personal than that, as they might say on MasterChef.

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So what you do if there were no limits? What would your business look like and how would this improve things for the client? Answers in emojis please.

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