The sense of community in financial services is such that when an industry figure passes away, it is felt not only by colleagues past and present, but also by the wider industry as a whole.
It is perhaps also testament to the mark they made in their field, and the professional legacy that remains.
The platform industry is an example of this. While investment platforms are nowadays a given, some in the advice industry today will remember the time before platforms were mainstream in the UK.
“Platforms really emerged [from] fund supermarkets, and it was a very simple concept. Well, it wasn’t actually, it was quite revolutionary at the time,” says Peter Mann, who was formerly chief executive of the retail platform Skandia.
“But when you look back on it, it’s a fairly simple concept. A fund supermarket is precisely what we would understand as a ‘food supermarket’. You go into a certain place, and you buy a number of brands from a number of different aisles, but you’re still in the same single arena. And that was what a fund supermarket was.
“It was a centralised repository for the efficient collection of funds, so that a fund holder could, through a single device – the supermarket – hold a basket of funds or a collection of funds.”
The advent of platforms
And so it was these fund supermarkets from which platforms developed.
“People like Bill Vasilieff and Ian Taylor, and others, began to think of what’s the next logical extension from a fund supermarket, to what became, and is currently known, as a wrap platform,” says Mann. “And the logical extension was that rather than just be a repository for product, it could become a facility for many more things.”
Indeed, platforms changed how people thought and operated, and put more power into the hands of customers and advisers, says Boring Money chief executive Holly Mackay, who previously founded Platforum.
A core group of people drove this change, Mackay adds, among them Vasilieff and Taylor, the late co-founders of Novia and Transact respectively.
“The early 2000s were a fun and innovative time to work in financial services. Technology was pretty rubbish – it was more like filing cabinets – people were sick of sitting on hold for hours, regulation was changing the way in which products were sold, demand for flexibility and choice was on the rise, and adviser commissions were in the regulator’s in-tray. Enter platforms stage left.
“Before platforms became mainstream in the UK, advisers had very little say in how they ran their businesses and product providers set the rules. And so platforms became much more than a piece of technology; they changed the whole way in which people thought and operated, and put more power into the hands of both the customer and the adviser.
