For the first time since RDR, it looks like the advice gap can close in a meaningful way. Digital investing, targeted support and simplified advice are how it's happening, and it's the part of the market I'm most interested in.
The same problem is being solved in different places. Banks and neobanks are coming back towards advice through digital. Life companies are using targeted support with their workplace and legacy customers. Platforms, asset managers and comparison sites are building the rails and the funds behind it.
What a firm needs depends on where it is. Early on it's a proposition question: designing targeted support or simplified advice properly, in line with the regulator. Then it's about embedding it, so it works across the business and with external partners, and a customer can move from guidance to targeted support, simplified advice and full advice when they need it. After that it becomes a go-to-market question, and the commercial and partnership hires matter most.
So the work starts with a real understanding of where a firm is and where it's trying to get to. The people who do well here are comfortable with a degree of ambiguity and autonomy. They work across external partners and every part of the business, from build and marketing to go-to-market and operations, and they keep a clear commercial sense of what the whole thing is for. Those people are harder to find, and that's where I spend a lot of my time.
The roles I place
- Chief Proposition Officers and Heads of Proposition
- Heads of Targeted Support
- Digital investing and direct-to-consumer product leads
- Partnership leads
- Commercial and distribution directors
Who I've worked with
I placed Seccl's Head of Growth, the platform behind the Moneysupermarket deal, and I work closely with Vanguard's digital and co-manufacturing team. I'm also running a retained search for a Director of Investment Proposition at a major UK life company.
How I work
Exclusive or retained, one brief at a time. That means a proper look across the whole market rather than the first ten CVs on a database, and a shortlist of people I've actually spoken to. Usually four, not forty.
If you're working out what to build, or who should build it, I'd like to hear about it.