100 - Not Out!

In this latest pile of TRAP, the Trap Pack discuss

• Topical Titbits
• Meat and Potatoes: 100 Not Out!
• TRAPist question from beloved TRAPist Tom L
• Culture Corner

Show links: http://tiny.cc/traplinks

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:06

A welcome to the Real Advisor Podcast, T R A P trap. Please follow us and join in the conversation on Twitter at Advisor Podcast, where you can suggest ideas and themes you'd like the trap team to discuss. Also, remember to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel, and leave a six out of five star review on iTunes. Doing all this really, really helps us, which means we can do more to help you. Now, let's head over to the studio for the latest pile of trap, you Yes,

Nick Lincoln: 0:47

indeed. Dear Travis, welcome back to what many people are calling episode 100 the end of the Real Advisor Podcast, T R A P Trap. My name is Lick Lincoln, and joining me somehow in a chaotic, properly chaotic digital studio of Doom of the three other horsemen of the apocalypse, Alan the storyteller, Smith Carl the voice, Stella Vochi, would you and the ultra heart. Now, gentlemen, we have a show packed full of app absolutely nothing, so let's start unpacking it straight away by going straight into the topical tidbits. Awkward pause, right. Who's first off? It's me. It's me. The topical tidbits, yes. So just let you know, the good friends of the show, Vanguard, up and coming asset manager, they need your money, give them some. Vanguard had their annual Tough Mudder thing, which is like a physical exercise in a field involving mud and slides and shit, and it's going on Friday, the 18th of September, and the track team are taking part, and we'd love to see you there. It's gonna be a fun day, I think, in West Sussex. So, get yourself registered, enter as an individual or as a team. Great way of fostering team skills, I'm told, whatever they are.

Carl Widger: 1:56

I actually looked, I looked at this dick on YouTube, some YouTube clips, but you have to work as a team to get over like 10 foot walls and stuff.

Nick Lincoln: 2:06

I don't tell myself I'll be fine. Yeah,

Carl Widger: 2:09

I was not gonna work in this group here. Friday got over

Alan Smith: 2:14

first. Just run away

Nick Lincoln: 2:19

Friday, the 18th of September in Sussex, RH 12, what's that, Reigate, Red Hill, Red Hill, Red Hill area? Do register, and the trap team will be there. Be great to see as many of you as possibly

Alan Smith: 2:33

glad that you've named it properly. I saw on the slate you had it down as bad mother. I was just waiting, I was just waiting to catch you, but you actually named it correctly.

Nick Lincoln: 2:45

Bad Mudder sounds like a sort of cringy 70s rock band, isn't it? Yeah, tough. Okay,

Alan Smith: 2:51

mudder. Yeah,

Nick Lincoln: 2:52

haven't got rid of some of the admin and done that. Let's go on to the next topical tip, bitch, which is Ultra.

Andy Hart: 2:58

I did do the original Tough Mudder, is absolutely hell. It's one of the most hardest things I've ever had to do. So we're not

Alan Smith: 3:04

doing it, so clearly good, good

Andy Hart: 3:07

luck everybody. Okay, so I was my first awful tip here. I'm not sure if this provider company has been mentioned before. A company called Bear Rock, they are a PI insurance company that's doing some innovative things in the IFA world, they've got a new white paper that's called Prevention is Better Than Cure, a field guide, which is a PDF that goes into quite a lot of detail about complaints, really, and how to be on the front foot around this. I've read through it, the top five things that they've found in their study is most complaints stem from confusion, not malice. Point number two, memory fades faster than you think. I think that's in relation to clients retaining what they were told. Potentially, ongoing engagement is your best protection. That's something that will play into the hands of people that are providing a proper service and seeing their clients regularly. Point number four, clients won't always tell you when they're confused. That's quite an interesting point to be aware of. And the final point is, how clients discover problems matter enormously. When clients find issues themselves, their reaction is disproportionately negative compared to when advisors disclose problems proactively, so yeah, it's worth a read, and I believe they're sort of pitching themselves as offering PI insurance to slightly better, cleaner, more vanilla firms than the ones that have sort of historically done products here, there, and everywhere, so yeah, check it out as a link in the show notes. Bear Rock, I'm not sure if any of you read this guy, but it's worth scrolling through. Alan, you're aware of the guys there, and

Alan Smith: 4:50

yeah, I think I did. I have mentioned them maybe a couple of years ago when they were a relatively new entrants, I think they sort of put themselves forward as. Very kind of digital and tech led, as far as they've

Andy Hart: 5:03

got, they've got a platform, and it's Jonathan Newell, and

Alan Smith: 5:06

yeah,

Andy Hart: 5:06

John Netting and Lee Robertson are part of the gang, and they're building it out, so yeah, Lee Robertson is

Alan Smith: 5:10

part of it, is he?

Nick Lincoln: 5:11

I believe so, yeah,

Alan Smith: 5:12

doing that,

Andy Hart: 5:13

doing good work,

Alan Smith: 5:14

yeah, Jonathan Yule has been around a long time, it's, it'll be interesting, and I know we're going to touch on this later in the topical tip, bits be interesting to see how AI impacts on compliance and complaints and things like that. Well, you've got a lot of meetings recorded, you've got the actual audio file, how that will impact it, could be it could go either way. Blessings, yeah. Probably,

Nick Lincoln: 5:37

you know, that's that's what I've been doing really since 2000 well, for at least 1010 years or so, is recording all my meetings, so for good or bad, I've got a complete audit trail, because the memory point you made there, ultra, is very, I think, a spot on people, not only as we get older, does our memory fade, but people will choose to retain those memories, that those messages they want, I think they heard, and echo chamber in clients' minds, and you did say that you didn't actually, you just about the audio from 10 years ago. This is what was said, for good or bad. I mean, you know, could also hang me what I said, but it's all there, and it's digital, so it's non-degradable, unlike our unlike our gray stuff. I would say

Carl Widger: 6:15

you should go directly into, because it is linked to this, your topical tidbit about your clients vetting your ice via your advice via AI, I think.

Nick Lincoln: 6:24

Thank you. Okay, nice one, Cole. Yeah, so I had an annual planning meeting last week with a with clients of my long-standing clients, nice gay couple, nice guys, and yeah, they've always been.. they are so they used to work for French Connections, so then they're very artistic, and they're very that side of the brain. So, with money, they're not, and they'd say this, they're not perhaps the most intuitive people with money, and they've taken my coaching over the years, and I've had to push them to do things, because I was a bit reticent, but they've always done what they would I told them to do, and now they're entering that next stage of their life, where they're starting the spending thing, and they're turning off the income tax, and their financial plans never look so strong or robust, which is a credit to them and a credit to me. Well, they took the advice I gave them, they didn't, they enacted it, so they're in a good position. However, you know, one of them, and talk about memory and loss of memory, and this is a thing that we all know, that one of the, one of the, one of the guys, he is, he's averse, he's got a real fear they're going to run out of money, because he grew up in poverty, and that even though now they're relatively affluent, that fear never goes, you know, the early muscle memories around money tend to stay with you, and if you, and short Alan, with your bulletproof entrepreneur, you've, I know you've dealt with people who grew up in, in heart, in hardship, and now got more money than they than they can ever need, but still probably worry about it, because it's hard to throw off those, those, those formative years around money, and one of the couple is like that, but then they really know that we've done great work as a threesome together, really good stuff, but the clients did feed the whole history of our relationship into Claude, that was things like suitability letters, emails, meeting investment portfolios. Yeah, did that as well, and said, "Okay, is our financial advisor giving us good advice? Is there anything we've missed out? And then, when they told me they'd done this, first part of me thought initially thought, you know, classic Lincoln reaction, cheeky buggers, but you know, then the next 10 seconds, once they talk me through the process of what they deal with, Clause, they go, "Oh, shit, I hope it came out okay. Anyway, I came, the Claw gave me a glowing review. So, thank you, AI bot. I passed the first test, and your advisor's advice totally lines up with your aspirations and your portfolios, the emergency buckets he's got there. That makes total sense. Understand that. So, that was great, but the point of this is expect more and more of this. Yeah, expect clients now to be vetting

Andy Hart: 8:49

every single day. Clients are doing

Nick Lincoln: 8:51

it, yeah, doing it all the time, ready for it. And again, I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good as long as the AI is up to it, and I think it's pretty much getting there, because it's going to weed out bad practice, I think, and again, if you're, if you're paying lip service to full fat financial planning, AI will catch you out if you're not, if you're not doing it, if you're just talking about investment portfolio. Yeah, yeah, yeah, normal.

Alan Smith: 9:16

I wonder, I mean, what, what do you think, what's this, the default setting to decide, like an AI bot makes a judgment as to whether the advice is good or not. At what point is it going to say this is bad advice, or you could improve? I mean, does it default to index investing, for example, which you would, you would argue that all the evidence over decades would say it is

Carl Widger: 9:41

evidence-based. Yeah, maybe that's.. I just wonder why. If

Alan Smith: 9:45

you just asked open questions and just said, 'What is better? Is there a better way to manage my pension fund? I mean, interesting to see, because I think it worked out well in this experience, but I can see a situation where somebody does this and. They say, and the Chat GPT, or Claude, or whatever, comes back and says, well, it could have been enhanced, it could have been better, you could have had, yeah, you know, let's, I mean, let's face it, that, for example, these factor tilts haven't exactly been successful for best part of 20 years, and so you could argue that a pure market cap weighted index was better, so it depends. You know what I mean. So, depends on the questions you ask, or the prompts, as they say. So, your

Nick Lincoln: 10:28

hand was raised, so speak.

Andy Hart: 10:31

Yeah, good point. And where will it draw the line if I just asked it? Oh, an advisor is charging me 6% initial fee to invest this money. Would it immediately flag that as well? This seems very high. It's a bit unusual. I'm just giving that as an extreme example. I know that's not sort of common practice, but I've given it as an extreme example. The other thing with the AI, obviously, at the moment, you know, depending on what IA platform we use, we can't put any personal client data in, so we can't just do what that client didn't throw all that stuff into, let's say, Claude. But the clients can, as in, next issue that information to them, and then they've just dumped it onto a, you know, AI platform of their choosing, and it's also going to play into the hands of the AI. The AI system is going to get smarter and smarter now. They're going to look at 1000s of financial plans every single year, and they're going to become smarter at recognizing, you know, what, what, what good looks like. It generally does default to the evidence when it comes to investing. I ask it frequently, just tell me the one fund I need to invest in for the rest of my life, and it often throws up all of the famous ranges that we know. But yeah, AI, I think, will play into the hands of good financial advisors. It will say it needs to be financial planning led, it needs to be funded with the correct investment portfolios, and your behavior is going to be very important through through all that cycle, so yeah, it's happening every single day.

Alan Smith: 11:46

So, if that, if, if what you say just there is correct, how is that going to impact the other clients of, let's say, without naming names, SJP, if the big discretionary managers that we know from previous conversations on this podcast, they're charging two and 3% a year. Is that going to come back with big red alert? You're paying way too much. This is suboptimal. It

Andy Hart: 12:09

may be. Yeah, I have actually heard that from people in some of the organizations, organizations that you said, and the initial stages it has flagged things, and then the client's been a bit reticent to move forward again. Interesting conversations to have, so yeah, there'll be there'll be unintended consequences, outcomes of it, and you know, second order effects. We don't know, but assume all of your clients are throwing all this stuff in AI, even if they don't tell you, just as the default position to take.

Nick Lincoln: 12:36

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. Okay, yeah, nice touch there, Carl. Thank you for bumping up the list, and sticking with you, actually, what you've got some good news from the MODOL.

Carl Widger: 12:46

Yeah, well, two things to say: we should replace PRSA Corner with Revolut Corner, because this is another Revolut story, but, but I kind of reflecting on this, like we're at episode 100 and I think the evolution of the financial planning business in Ireland has been, it's just kind of gone with the, with the, with the journey of Trap, and I think we're in a, we're in a really good place at the moment, but yeah, Revolut came out, I'm just going to read some stuff here, they came out with a report about the amount of people investing in Ireland on their platform, now the numbers are relatively small, but it just shows, I suppose, a trend, and hopefully it'll continue to trend in the right direction. That they increased their amount of investors, so not savers, but we'll did say what they're investing in to 1.1 billion last year to more than 348,000 people, so the amounts they're investing are very small. Okay, but it's, it's, they're all good trends, shall we say. But interestingly, the largest group by a distance of of people investing is the 18 to 34 year old people. Okay, so younger people are now beginning to, yeah, let's go, but then the top three investments, US equities, so and then in the US equities that aim, Nvidia, and a couple of others, right? So the ones that you'll know, right, so they're buying direct stocks and hoping to get rich on direct stocks. Number two is money market funds, right? So hey, there's a lot of room for advice still, and then the last one, yeah, and then the last one is ETFs, but look, I just think generally the trend is that Ireland is beginning to mature, and there is a lot more work being done, it's in literally, I could have picked, I don't know, 20 different articles over the last couple of weeks about, you know, we have this new government savings thing coming in, and ideas around that, and taxes on investments, fees on investments, whatever. The more it's in the mainstream, the better for everybody, because it's it, it now is being spoken about, and I think if we can really keep. A hammer down on this one. Well, then you know, generations to come are going to be very thankful for the work that's been done by so many different stakeholders. I would say right now, so yeah, all good. I think exciting times ahead. And you know what, Nick, I will segue into something else that I was going to say, just on that rope.

Alan Smith: 15:20

Yeah, well, on that point, there's a couple of,

Carl Widger: 15:22

there's a couple of new entrants to the Irish market, as exclusively revealed, and I shouldn't have a couple of months back when I said second were coming to Ireland. Well, they have now actually announced officially that they are in Ireland, and they are now trying to talk to advisors, which that's really, really brilliant, but then very, very interesting, and I would say yes, and best of luck to our good pal Dave Ferguson and his team at Second, but I, this one was this one was, wow, Goldman Sachs have their kind of, I suppose, not their top level of service is called Marcus Bank, as you probably know. Well, Marcus Bank has come to Ireland. Now they're trying to figure out exactly what that service looks like. They're hiring a few people, but there will be some very big stockbroking firms shaking in their boots right now, because Marcus Bank coming to Ireland, whilst it'll probably take a while before they'll make a real impact. They will make a real impact, I think they're going to begin with their, they're going to begin their first personal deposit rate cash, which will, so that'll suck money away from the big banks, but they won't stop there. And that's a hugely, hugely successful business. It's more for your mass affluent mid market, and that is the place where a lot of us financial planners play. So, financial planners, beware, the competition is hotting up, but again, we're only getting going here. I think there's loads of business for everybody, and I think more significant players who do it right to a large extent. I know you'd have your thoughts on Golden Slacks, Nick, but you know who are putting proper financial solutions towards people, I think that's that can only be a good thing, so, so really like if I think about episode one of Trap to episode 100 our evolution has been actually really fast, and I'm unbelievably excited about it. I think we're in a really, really great place.

Alan Smith: 17:39

We'll call it the track effect. Yeah, the Irish finance financial community, that's interesting. In the Marcus thing, Andy, you would know about this. I thought they'd shelved

Nick Lincoln: 17:49

it. His hands up. Oh, sorry, I didn't see

Alan Smith: 17:52

it. Sorry, carry on, mate. I thought they shelved Marcus in the UK, anyway. Launched it to great fanfare a few years ago. Anything about action, same thing that they can do, but

Andy Hart: 18:04

they were headline rates for a while, that's what they do down there, launching a new territory, and they just do the, you know, top, top, top rate to attract all the cash, then work out what to do. Sorry, my question to you, Carl, was, what do you think Seckels play is going to be again? If you had to guesstimate, you know, in the UK, there are very much back-end plumbing of a lot of these platforms, they have a lot of techie, techie tech, it's not like direct to consumer, and any idea what the play is going to be there.

Carl Widger: 18:32

Yeah, I would say partner with some big firms who've got large AOM, and then also go to advisors who are, you know, doing financial planning using a platform that market is only going to grow more and more and more, so there is a huge opportunity, like the platform space here is very limited in terms of who's operating in it properly, so I think there's a there is opportunity here for sure European

Andy Hart: 19:04

play as well, European is as well. It definitely

Carl Widger: 19:06

is, and that's the Marcus thing, is also European play as well. So, like, but that's like Interactive Brokers come in and said, "Oh, we're just basing it in Dublin, and we're going to go to Europe, and I went, "Here, hold on a second, we were only going to hire 25 people here. Now they now have 130 people in Ireland, because they're all seeing that Ireland is a is a place where there is a lot of cash sloshing around to be put to use, but I would say partnering with some big players who don't have their own platforms and will need their own platforms is the best way to make significant inroads into the Irish market for the likes of Settle.

Andy Hart: 20:16

Yeah, interesting.

Nick Lincoln: 20:17

Just to, just to confirm that Marcus Banks still exist in the UK, and just look at the website, they've got 4.9% on a 12 year fixed rate bonds, not still high

Alan Smith: 20:27

rates. Yes, just correcting you.

Nick Lincoln: 20:34

Did I say 12 years? I thought, said 12 months. Okay, right. Ah, advisor happiness. Come on, give us some. We need

Alan Smith: 20:42

it. This is an article I read over the weekend. Do you guys ever see this Financial Advisor magazine was the online thing, American, obviously, financial advisor had the US

Andy Hart: 20:54

randomly. It's usually

Alan Smith: 20:56

got some quite good and interesting articles, but this one was a take. They took it from Michael Kitsis, and his, he's done again another deep dive, massive survey on the subject of advisor happiness, and it caught my eye, because, because it kind of reflected the now legendary trap survey that we did a couple of months ago, and it just looked, it looked at the levels of happiness amongst advisors, and what were the key traits, and I thought it was quite interesting, because from memory, and I put a link to it in the show notes, there's this, there was three interesting aspects of it. Number one was the number of client households or families that you look after. The sweet spot, they say, is between 40 and 100 and I thought that's quite interesting, with it again, all this talk about AI, people talking about, or we could have 200 300 clients now in the future with AI, but at the moment, anyway, maybe that gets, maybe that will improve if the kind of client-facing time increases and the admin burden becomes less, but there does appear to be a sweet spot in terms of number of client households you look after. Secondly, again, I thought interesting because people try different methods of this effectively, and translating it from the American effectively, where you've got where you operate on a kind of pod system, and you've got an advisor with immediate support to support him or him or her, versus centralized, because I've spoken to quite a few people, and they are moving their firms to centralized admin, and certainly the big players, as I understand it, as people have told me in the past, is all centralized, so you sort of throw your work into some centralized work pool, so they are the people with that system, are much less happy than those with sort of a pod, a para planner, an associate support person, yeah, makes sense, and the final thing, which again it just reflected exactly what we saw on that survey that we did, was those with external ownership, specifically according to this report they did, private equity are significantly less happy in the day to day sort of quality of life and how they enjoy their work, they're considerably by quite some margin less happy, which again was reflected in that, so I mean the optimum it would seem if happiness, and they would just say, you know, adviser happiness, that's a kind of ephemeral thing, it's what does it mean, but certainly if advisors, in particular, are less happy, Kumbaya, my lord perfect, but it does, it does make a commercial point that if advisors are less happy, you're going to get more turnover, and therefore you're going to spend a lot more of your resources on recruitment and trying to hire people and train people up into a new business, so if you're trying to keep a stable team of, then it seems like having autonomy, having control, having a support system, having not too many families and households to look after, and an external ownership can be an issue for some.

Andy Hart: 24:08

It also mentions profitability matters more than efficiency. Delegation beats automation. Are we looking at the happiest advisor in the world here, as mr. Nick Lincoln on the call? See the issue to me of this survey. The only thing that he doesn't take is he does everything himself. He hasn't got a team behind him, but apart from that, you are, you should be the happiest advisor in the world. Nick must be, you must be a joy to live with.

Nick Lincoln: 24:33

I think I am, and I think I am on that score as well. What, your hand is raised?

Carl Widger: 24:38

Yeah, I think I'm, I'm, I'm well placed to discuss this, because I've obviously gone from one into the other, and both have pros and both have cons, but what I will say is 40 to 100 relationships is, I've heard that so much, I've never believed in that, I just haven't. I think, like, as you mature over a long period of time, that might be possible, but anyone trying to scale a business, even if it's only to scale a small business, if you're looking at those numbers, you're it ain't going to work, I'm afraid, right? And I'm talking about that from my meta states, right? It needs to be stronger than that, and for me, 150 is probably more about right, and as your clients become more mature and there's more complexity. Yeah, sure, you can. You can move that down, but anybody setting out on their journey thinking all I need to do is get 40 clients, you'll be out of business pretty quick. My opinion, just that it's really well made point about the pod system, right? And having dedicated support, whatever, and I can tell you for absolute sure, for absolute positivity, you can't do that at a bigger level, because it, there has to be centralized systems and processes, and when you get into the bigger organizations, the bigger firms, you know, having autonomy is a huge risk for the business, so you're just that they're the things that you give up, but you get lots of other things, you know, so there are lots of other positives, but you know it. Working in a small business, and maybe one that you've set up yourself, is just much, much different. And if that's what you value the most in Nick's case, well, then that's where you should stay, but, but look to think that things are going to stay the same when you're in a bigger organization, it just can't happen like that, you know, and you got to, you got to either embrace the change, but I think the whole point of the report here, Alan, is is is really valuable, that advisor happiness is is something that you should be very focused on, because a happy team is just a much better environment to every for everyone to work on, never mind the turnover of people or whatever, but if the work we do has such a deep impact on the families that we that we work for, that if then you know behind the scenes you're not having a good time, you're not enjoying it, it's all a bit of a pain in the ass, and I feel like I'm totally restricted. That energy comes across into the work that you do, and you won't do that great work for the family. So, yeah, I think I'm very focused on that now. My new role to make sure that we create as best an environment as possible, but at the same time trying to say to everybody, look, because of the size of this thing, now there are going to have to be guardrails, but I haven't yet spoken to anybody who doesn't think that you know uniformity doesn't make huge sense, there's nobody has challenged that with there is, if you know prospective clients of ours come in and you're talking to me or you're talking to John, who works beside me. Broadly speaking, the solutions have to be the same. Broadly speaking, the advice has to be same. I haven't met anybody who doesn't agree that, yeah, that's something that we have to look at, but very interesting. I haven't read that report yet, but I will be reading that on an airplane later on, for sure. Thank you.

Alan Smith: 29:04

Just, just to take the, the other side of that, I think the Alan, you're really

Nick Lincoln: 29:10

struggling with the raised hand symbols, aren't you? But my hands up, yeah. I'll close Nick. Oh, okay, go ahead. For God, well, just arrived. Sure, I get it. The Nick, if I did it,

Alan Smith: 29:25

so I've still got jet lag. Where have

Andy Hart: 29:27

you been?

Carl Widger: 29:29

You know, you, what have you been

Alan Smith: 29:31

doing? I don't want to talk about it, goes see

Nick Lincoln: 29:40

two goals in this World Cup, and they were the first two conceded by Scotland against Brazil. The bank accounts of the Scottish Defense. Yeah, but anyway,

Carl Widger: 29:47

it doesn't matter how Scotland performed on the football pitch, their fans won on this podcast, because that'd be too indulgent.

Alan Smith: 29:56

But oh my god, Boston and Miami, where I've just come back from incredible experience, incredible. I wish the football team did half as well as the fans did, because we just took over two cities. Wonderful. Anyway, I've forgotten what I was gonna say. I'll

Nick Lincoln: 30:15

come in my post, not really scalable if you have that small number of clients, but Alan, with your firm, you know you've got a multi-ri firm, and you've got Don and Graham and Charles there off the top of your head. How many client families do they each look after? Would you say?

Alan Smith: 30:30

Right, good point. Because one thing about me is I was I was thoughtful in the early days of the business, and I was quite clear that I wanted to be more of a kind of, I don't know, a high-end vanilla boutique. So, we very, so we came up with the plan, it was in all of us, and we've got, you know, I'm not an advisor, as you know, we've got five advisors, chartered planners, right now, and what we aim for is 75 clients, 75 families, households per advisor. Now that gets a bit out of sync from time to time. I think Graham and Charles have got more than I know, they've got more than that, so there's a bit of a transition going on to hand clients across to Ollie and to Hazel. Are sort of younger advisors, but because you're trying to, the thing here is, if you, if you, then distill down to the next level of the calculation, it's average revenue per client, and therefore average profitability per client, because the other thing I think Andy alluded to in that report is, is that a lot of advisors have tried to take on like lower revenue clients and try to leverage technology like online service and stuff, and just hasn't worked, and we all know that hasn't worked. A bunch of people have tried it in the UK, just sort of self-service DIY type thing. It doesn't really get much traction, so we were always trying to focus on relatively high averages for IFA land, and I know that's easy to say, because when you're starting off, it's that you just sort of take in the early days, of course, we take anyone that we can just sort of pay the bills, but I think that for me that's the thing, 75 families, if you work out, we did a whole lot of calculations about how many hours are available for you, and of course things are changing pretty rapidly, I have to say with technology, but at the end of the day, what clients are paying for is that face time, and ideally you want more of it, and so it depends on what way you go, so you can, you know, technology is going to improve, you could move to 150 200 clients, but you aren't going to get the depth, the same level of depth, and if I, if a client's paying us 20 grand a year, they want that really highly, super highly personalized, not templated cookie cutter service that, if you're dealing with more than mass affluent by definition commercially, you have to deliver. So, I just think there's an important point here that you have to decide what sort of firm you want to be early on. Are you scaled like Carl's business and the new empire that he's building again, that's a scale business, and you can't really do that. You can't do that sort of boutique, highly personalized. Nick is the opposite end of that spectrum. You couldn't get more personalized, but again, in our firm, that's that's where the number sits, on average 75 per advisor. I disagree. I know that you want to come in. I disagree on a couple of things. So, so the

Carl Widger: 33:16

first thing is 75 in is what you've fallen on now, 1015 years into a very mature business in the center of London, right? When we started the business out in the southwest of Ireland, in Limerick, you know that was never going to work, so I suppose you know that the geography will matter there. Yeah, so I think that that has come down, but what I, but I disagree that we can't. If we.. I'm very focused on the moment at segmenting our business and having different service levels for different clients, and so I'm.. I'm fully convinced. I hope I'm right that we can offer the, you know, the very tailored service, but we have to be very strict about at what level we do that, right, and that there are there are a couple of levels before you get there, and that there will be an execution only model of some description, because there just has to, and you can't give financial planning to someone who's got a 40 grand personal retirement bond, even if they need it, you can't, because we'll break the business, and we won't be able to serve the people at the higher end and give them the proper service that they need. Technology and AI may mean, in a couple years' time, I'll change my mind on that, but right now I don't have the tools to be able to deliver, deliver those kinds of service, so I think you can deliver, you know, to clients where you're getting 20 grand a year fees. I think you can, and I, and furthermore, I think you must, because if you don't, someone else will, and you just won't retain the clients. So I think that's that's really, really important, and we're, we're, we're focusing on that, and we're kind of giving ourselves the summer to figure out the segmentation, and that kind of stuff, but it's, it's, it's a, it's a quandary, it's like I keep saying, this is like the impossible jigsaw, but you know what, if you keep looking at the jigsaw for long enough, you'll start coming up with ideas, and this is, this, this can be done, it's just, it's not easy.

Andy Hart: 35:18

I mean, the article is very intentional. We're just looking at advisor happiness, not what is the best way to grow a firm. How do you scale a firm? How do you work with teams? What is the ultimate number of clients? How can you earn the most amount of money? How can you get the biggest exit value? So they were just drilling down on what they have deemed, what are the various points to make the happiest advisors. I believe we've sort of bled out a little bit here.

Alan Smith: 35:47

I think it's quite an interesting subject. So, I'll come back to you, Carl, on that. And I 100% get it. Where you coming from, segmentation and you know profitability is really important, and you know, I just thought about that for years, and it was kind of revolutionary thinking a decade ago that all clients need to be profitable, and a lot of firms will take on unprofitable clients in the hope that they'll become profitable in the future, and I just didn't like that idea from the beginning. Why, why would you do that, which. You know, they might win the lottery one day, they might get an inheritance, but come on, because subsidy, yeah,

Carl Widger: 36:22

yeah, I have a guy challenging me on exactly that, like right now, yeah, but so there might be a real

Alan Smith: 36:29

life experience for us. So we did this segmentation exercise long, long time ago, and we had like an entry level service, and it was, we just, we called it Portfolio Management Service. You get access to our intellectual property, our unique investment portfolios, which are outperform most other things out there, similar to you guys, but no financial planning, because that's complex, time-consuming, and all those things, and really impacts your profit, as you, as you know, when you're actually building financial plans and really getting into the weeds of clients' expenditure and all that sort of stuff. So, we did, we ran that for a year or so, and then we just all realized we can't do it, we can't deliver investment, sensible investment advice, without knowing what the, what the problem is we're trying to solve, what the time horizon is, and so we ended up in this, and this is the risk you will run, Carl, in the future is that you're, you know, you've got your kind of light touch service, for which is all you know costed out well and profitable, but then advisors, we're by nature, we're very helpful and supportive, and you kind of, and you know that there's another service, a little bit more sort of up market, if you like, or more costly, and you end up, and that's what we did. We had advisors just delivering financial plans, sort of light touch financial plans. And before we knew it, we thought, bollocks, this doesn't work. We just, we just got to focus on doing one core service. Yes, at the higher end, you can create some really ex useful extra bells and whistles, almost private office, family office type thing, but there's a core service. If you believe in full fat financial planning, there's a core service that needs to be delivered. Not saying it can't be done, you can have a digital online DIY type service, but I just think that's running two different businesses under the same roof. Just my experience, but I'm sure you'll figure

Andy Hart: 38:15

it out. The irony of you offering that service, Alan, the real value is the financial planning and the driver that's going to get the clients to invest more and potentially become a standard client will be all run via the financial planning, which is the element of the service that you decided to remove. So, what you probably did is they built up 3040, 5080, 100, whatever the numbers were, and then shipped it out somewhere, because you won't deliver about it. You think, oh, they're potentially going to become a good client here, and then they bought a bought a house that you didn't know about in Devon, or something. Anyway,

Carl Widger: 38:49

I agree with Alan, like Methods was was set up for that core service to look after and do financial planning, or whatever, but hey, I'm in a world now where there's there's a health insurance division and employee benefits division, and there's business coming from, like, you wouldn't believe it, so I have to have to figure this out, and I think you know we can offer financial plans, but charge for them, and that means most people won't go for the financial plan at the lower end, which is goes back to Andy's point. This is a luxury service, so we'll be giving our premium or hot storage use, Andy, but you know what I mean. Anyway, so yeah, it's a challenge to very,

Alan Smith: 39:30

you're the man of the job, mr. Witcher.

Carl Widger: 39:32

It's very cool. It's actually very cool. The happiness

Andy Hart: 39:35

levels on the call between Nicholas Lincoln and Carl Widger, on the journey ahead, I can just feel the number difference here, but Carl's

Nick Lincoln: 39:44

got compensated for his, yeah, I know, yeah, yeah, he just looks at

Alan Smith: 39:50

his bank account, yeah, everything

Andy Hart: 39:53

Nick's having a better time than him, he gets out the gets out revolute as

Nick Lincoln: 39:58

we I want to make a revolute drop. By the way, this is getting daft. Yeah, just to close on this point, and just, just to underline, underline Andy's point. For the younger trappers listening to this, the financial plan is kind of still born. There's no value in a financial plan, it's out of date. The moment it's done, the value to the client is in the financial planning, the ongoing, the ongoing service, and that's why I don't think a light touch financial plan service can never really, really work. Okay. Oh yeah, more good news from our beloved Treasury.

Andy Hart: 40:27

Yeah, this is dreadful, dreadfully dull and boring, but we'll mention anyway. So, the Treasury has confirmed 22% stocks and shares ISER cash interest charge. Now, this is very unusual for the ISA historical PEP, etc. etc. They've never meddled with it. I don't believe

Nick Lincoln: 40:48

they used to charge interest on cash.

Andy Hart: 40:50

Okay, since I've been an advisor, because obviously you boys are a lot older than me, they've never faffed around with the ISA, the interest inside it. Carl, mute, please. Sorry, mate, you're typing, okay? So they charge 22% on cash inside stocks and shares ISAs. So there's this, there's this movement to limiting the cash ISA now to 12,000 pounds cap for people under 65 They're trying to promote an investing culture, that's why they're making. Making cash inside investment ices unattractive, and they're also restricting investment ices moving to cash, then being switched to cash, cash ISS. It can still, the money can still go the other way around from cash to investment ISIS. I'm not too sure about if that's a change restricting it from investment ISIS to cash ISIS, because I've never had to do it that way round. Okay, well, that's a new change, and also this is the recurring theme of them forcing you at some point to invest some of your proceeds and funds inside an investment ISA into specifically UK companies. This is their bright idea, it's messy, and now all the platforms I'm assuming I got another job to do in terms of trying to work out the percentage interest on the cash, so now there might be a triple cash skim on investment ISAs. The platform will be holding back their margin, which is not unusual. Banks have been doing it forever, but it's just a bit, seems a bit icky, icky from the platforms. They'll be charging their normal fees, and then there'll be 22% on the interest element of it. So, another sort of three clips of the ticket, as we call it. I think this is going to come into law or regulation. So, anyway, Smithy, over to you. Do you know

Alan Smith: 42:46

the really interesting thing about all this is that they've exempted money market funds, so you just park if you want to, if you want to help hold cash, you just buy the whatever it is, the Fidelity money market, and get cash like returns with no, there is

Nick Lincoln: 43:00

a ring tool there. I think you can't, you can have 99% in money. Yes, if it's 100 bizarre world is

Andy Hart: 43:08

like non qualifying assets. Are

Alan Smith: 43:11

you sure? I

Andy Hart: 43:11

mean, yeah,

Alan Smith: 43:14

so 99% in something in equities,

Nick Lincoln: 43:17

yeah, it's

Alan Smith: 43:19

just again the chat. I think we've have spoken about this in the past. One of the real attractions of ISIS was simplicity. Yeah, now just every client make it more and more complex, and you know, certainly in the short term, until or unless they bring in the, you know, the tax break is only for UK equities, and as we discussed that in the past, that's a nonsense as well, in terms of where a lot of UK companies make their money. This is a massive boon for the US tech business, because if people are going to shift into equities, the default is that they'll end up in S and p5 100, and, and what have you. That's what the point is. If the thought process to try to encourage us to become a nation of investors and savers, I think it's going about it completely.

Nick Lincoln: 44:08

And also, there can't be that much money sloshing around in cash and stocks and shares. I mean, there are certain situations where

Andy Hart: 44:14

I think there's a lot, only because let's just assume about 5% is probably in cash, maybe a little bit more. Between five and 10% is in cash,

Nick Lincoln: 44:21

right?

Andy Hart: 44:21

The total value of ISA stocks and shares, five, 10% is in cash. It's probably a nice easy win for them to be totally honest, but again,

Nick Lincoln: 44:30

Robert,

Andy Hart: 44:33

I'll

Nick Lincoln: 44:33

get my 5% down to 2% It's not gonna, you know, so I've, you know, my pen and I, we've got stocks and shares ISAs, but they're sitting in cash, because that money's got to be there in two years' time to clear the mortgage, right? So it's in cash for a reason. So all I'm doing now is just converting it both to cash ISIS, you know, I'm making that switch over to cash ISIS, and that's what I'm sure people will do. And hey, presto, the HMRC is not getting 22% of the interest on my stocks and shares, ISIS in that situation, and also talk about simplicity and the beauty of ISIS. What was their simplicity? They're revamping the LISA, aren't they? Complicated, that looks like the most complicated thing ever. Okay, so, as Sarah, okay, where are we on the slate? So, over to you, Nicholas Morgan. Thank you, thank you, Ultra. So, yes, bit of ongoing open saw with me, FNZ. I don't know their figures, they, so the last last year, 2025 their losses rose by 98% to 1.4 billion US dollars, and of course, the CEO and the CFO said, well, there were exceptional write-offs in that year, blah blah blah, but they seem to be having year upon year really quite worrying figures, and given that FNZ powers apparently the two biggest advisor-led platforms, according to the link from CityWork, which are Quilter and Aviva, I don't know, I would be getting that, I think this, I'd be getting nervous about this. I need to

Andy Hart: 45:59

get acquired quickly.

Nick Lincoln: 46:01

Yeah, something, something. Who's

Alan Smith: 46:04

gonna, who's gonna acquire a dated technology and massive loss-making business?

Andy Hart: 46:09

They, they will be acquired. I'm telling you, they'll be acquired. They've got a shed load of influence and assets. There'll be lots of firms. Just licking their lips on acquiring that for cheap,

Alan Smith: 46:19

have you?

Andy Hart: 46:20

They need to be acquired.

Alan Smith: 46:21

Have you finished, Nick?

Nick Lincoln: 46:23

Yeah, just wanted to bring that. Yeah, thank you.

Alan Smith: 46:24

No, I just wanted to add to that, because the other platform that they largely power is Aberdeen, who, as you know, we've got quite a few, quite a few quid on it, to say the least, and I, yeah, I got to say publicly, this is something that we're focusing on now. We have board meetings where we're just understanding what are the kind of risk reward scenarios. I don't suspect for a second that there's any risk to client money, but there's potentially, I mean, they clearly, FNZ, with their sort of input in UK financial services, are too big to fail. They will be bailed out, rescued, or whatever, but I can imagine that is going to be a nightmare to try to sort of pull apart and, sorry, replatform.

Andy Hart: 47:15

Alan, you and many other advisors, so the shift now of the assets leaving the FNZ bus are going to be astronomical, hence they need to get acquired by someone deep pockets and fix this problem before it gets worse and worse and worse and worse.

Alan Smith: 47:29

I'm just not sure, I mean, yeah, that's an ideal world. Don't forget, and as Nick's mentioned in the past, and it's also referred to in that article, they've got a huge court case going on with their, you know, their employees, former shareholders, and what have you, founder members, according to the, you know, allegedly they've stitched them up in terms of the kind of refinancing they did with external investors, you mentioned talking about, you know, referring back to get the kumbaya on again, but yeah, employee happiness. Do you see that they do a net promoter score? Just, you know, is it, you know, do you enjoy working here? And it's absolutely at the rock bottom. So, they've got really disgruntled, pissed-off employees, they've got huge, you know, litigation in play. Billions, billions are at stake, and from what I can see, and from what people tell me, the technology is outdated, and we'd need a lot of investment.

Nick Lincoln: 48:23

Well, you've had some.. I mean, I'm not gonna.. I'm not breaching here, but I know that Capital has had some horror stories recently with that, Aberdeen, hasn't it? It's just.. it seems like, you know, yeah. I mean,

Alan Smith: 48:31

this is the thing, you've.. and again, you learn as you, as you go along, you know, you got Aberdeen, who are you know, they were certainly one of the largest, most successful platforms in the UK, advisor platforms. They've got their own challenges, you know, you know, they've been through, there's been well documented, their share price, it has recovered a fair bit, but the share price was absolutely cratered over the last five years. There were lots of issues going on in that organization, but then the next layer beneath them is FNZ, which is largely powered and provided the technology for their wrap platform, as they call it. So, there's like two layers of issues there. If one of them was was working really well, you could probably just about manage it. So, it's it's a real issue, you know. The I know that certainly with Andy and Nick, all roads lead back to Transac. They're not, they're not without, they're not perfect, to say the least. We use Transac as well. Got the challenges. It's interesting, as this, you know, world evolves. You know, Carl's mentioned SecL going to Ireland. SecL seem to be.. I mean, I've heard anecdotal issues with pretty much every platform that we deal with, and you can name all the all the companies, and then we'll all talk a good game, but the advisors using them. I've just, I've just heard stories, so it's a really, it's a really challenging issue, because platforms, by definition, are the ultimate commodity product, they provide, you know, custody trading, and so, in theory, and I know this, they've got a few of them, got bells and whistles and extra things, and as we know in economics, commoditized products, there's a race to the bottom on price, but it's a little

Carl Widger: 50:07

bit like banking, don't, and you know, when you look at like the traditional banks trying to move their models into the world, whereas you've got the fintechs coming in, because they, yeah, exactly, they didn't have, they didn't have the legacy shit to deal with. You look at, you look at Fundament, and the work that they're doing, and they got to start from a blank page and say, right, what actually does, what does best in class look like now, because of the technology we have available to us. So, the likes of Fun M Second, you know, they're there, they're well placed, I think, to do really well going forward. I really do.

Alan Smith: 50:40

What will they are? And they can do it at very low cost. I'm just finishing off my point. And you know, I've had several conversations with Fergie over the years. I don't really understand the tech aspect of it, but basically, as you know, that's in our shit non-technical conversation, Carl. They've just got more modern technology that is, it's just very efficient, and they can deliver it at this, just wafer thin, you know, basis points and costs. I think they can run it for two or three basis points

Carl Widger: 51:09

very, very quickly, you know. So, yeah, so this is going to be an issue,

Alan Smith: 51:14

as is, you've. Not just incumbents, legacy providers, but it's just, it is still very, very difficult. You can't just flick a switch and say let's all move to fundment. It's not quite as easy as that, despite what Ola tells me.

Andy Hart: 51:28

But remember, FNZ are the layer below fundment. I mean, fund men provide their own tech, Transac provide their own tech, HL provide their own tech. This is, I probably guesstimate, about 80% of the platforms are powered by a third party. Yeah, 20% of them only have their own tech, and mostly the ones that have their own tech, there's less horror stories being shared about them. The assets on the platform of FNZ at the moment, a 2.5 trillion, and rising every single day. The revenue for last year was 1.8 billion, and, as Nick alluded to, the loss was 1.4 billion. So, there's not a lot of money swashing around here, and you're right, Alan, it is a race to the bottom. You can imagine the pricing arrangements they have with some of their largest clients. Yeah, I think SJP recently, when they did a lot of their big deals on the asset management, they were paying basis points I've never seen before, you know, like 0.01118 basis points, not even 10 basis. So, so the deals that they're cutting on these things obviously show through to the accounts, but they need to do something. If the employees are incredibly unhappy, the company's hemorrhaging money, someone needs to make a decision, don't they? And they've got a court case with the original founders. It's, it's a little bit worrying. A two and a half trillion, you know, is on their platform. Always we go.

Nick Lincoln: 52:54

Okay, that's good. Thrashing watch,

Carl Widger: 52:57

yeah, the Renatus M and A newsletter. So, Renatas are an Irish private equity firm, and they do this newsletter every Sunday. Now, it's very Irish-oriented, so I suppose this is for our Irish fuel viewers and listeners. If you're not subscribed to it already, you should. It's, it's pretty cool. They do a kind of opinion piece at the start. They talk about all the M and A activity that's going on in Ireland. Then they'll do kind of companies that have received funding for various things, and then they do people who've been appointed to good jobs. But so I would, I would strongly advise anybody operating in business at all in Ireland to make sure that you're on that newsletter, it's really, really good. But this week's opinion piece, Nick prepared to be triggered, was Ireland versus the UK economy 10 years on from Brexit. So I won't go through all of the various metrics that they use, but it's very clear that the one of the impacts of Brexit, whatever, but the impact, and whatever about what you guys think, Ireland was a massive, massive beneficiary, and the last 10 years for us have have come at a really good time, so we saw a plus 39% employment from 2 million to 2.7 9 million, which is effectively full employment, whereas the UK employment increased by 9% in the same period. And then the other one that I thought was really interesting was we had a point 7 billion deficit 10 years ago, where now 11 point 2 billion surplus. Of course, we can't fall asleep at the wheel, because we know that that's largely resulted from a very few amount of companies, FDI companies, paying that. But the deficit in the UK over that period of time grew from 76 billion to 129 billion. I am totally aware, totally aware that these things are cycles, and I'm totally aware that I'm talking now in Ireland, being in a very, very good place, but we do not have clear road ahead that doesn't come with significant challenge. We do have challenges ahead. What will this look like in 10 years' time, I don't know, but it's just interesting to see the economic stories of two next-door neighbors, and I suppose the impacts on the people living and doing business in the, in those countries. Just interesting, I thought.

Nick Lincoln: 55:35

Okay. Thank you for that watch. Okay, so me me, so in episode 99 of The Real Advisor Podcast, TR AP Trap, we were speaking about what happens with ongoing fees upon the passing of a client, and whether or not you should or could switch to cash across portfolios to lock in the value for the estate, so you don't get angry beneficiaries quibbling that the portfolio has dropped by 2% as the probate took six months to get through, so anyway, I added a clause to my client agreement letter, and I said in it, on your demise, on your passing, we will - we, I can't remember the exact word, but I basically said we will, we will move your all your portfolios into cash. Cash, just so you know, and I thought I'll just feed my client agreement into, into AI again, so I use Saturn and Gemini, just I said, said to just go through my client, we've never looked for anything that's that could be a red flag there with the FCA, and it came out, everything was fine, but it picked up on this, this paragraph I just added that said, you cannot do that, you categorically cannot do that, the client is dead. You cannot then act upon that client's portfolio, no matter what we might think we'd like to do. You cannot do that. And then last week I had my annual compliance meeting with Rob from the Compliance Department, and I, you know, came - it was all perfectly fine. And I was talking to him about, he said,'You cannot do that. And he said, 'Also, you should, you know, you need to add a thing to your client agreement about what happens on death in respect of fees. So I'm going to quickly read this paragraph out. So now, out of the new section, what happens on death following the death of a client? Any ongoing authority to act ceases. We may continue to provide services to the executives, administrators, trustees, or beneficiaries only where we have received the necessary authority and agreed terms of engagement. Any fees for such services will be charged in accordance with our current tariffs of charges, blah blah blah. On being notified of a client's death, the firm will contact the executives or administrators to agree the next steps, which may include moving assets to cash, where that is agreed to be in the interests of the estate. The ongoing client care program fee, see below, ceases from the date the firm is notified of the client's death. Now, I know, Carl, you're gonna, this is gonna raise your heckles, but again, it's saying you cannot be charging ongoing fees, it just cannot do it, and that's that. So I put that, my, in my letter, that just nail things, and you can't switch to cash unilaterally, you can,

Andy Hart: 57:49

you can, if you speak to the executors, yeah,

Nick Lincoln: 57:51

yeah, you know, actually, you've got to be appointed,

Alan Smith: 57:53

executors got to a point

Nick Lincoln: 57:56

that could take weeks and months, couldn't scoot into that months, you know. So, yeah, but that's

Alan Smith: 58:02

you might have to change your practices, Andrew. Sorry,

Andy Hart: 58:05

I always speak to the executives, I will speak to the person that's gonna be receiving it. So, there's anyway, my final point on this was the lawyers, because I've gone through this recently, went through it this year and last year. The lawyers just want to know the value of everything on the date of death, that is what everything gets pinned to, which again is another reason why I don't want any fluctuations with that. Tell us the evaluation on the date of death for all of the stuff that you look after for them. They then put that into their, you know, into their advice, and then that then gets spat out to the various people that will be receiving the assets, so yeah, thanks for doing that, Nick. That's, that's interesting. I'll take a look, but yeah, another point for not wanting investment volatility is the lawyer only cares about what is the value on Thursday, the 30th of October, whatever that date is. Okay,

Nick Lincoln: 58:54

yeah, yeah, and you know, and I, if you know me, I'm not a big fan of legislation, but if there was to be one bit legislation the FCA did bring in and said, yes, you are mad, you must switch to cash on death, I'd be, yes, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, but we can't, right, Andrew,

Andy Hart: 59:11

yeah, this is a brief story, just a bit of a heads up, I suppose, people listening to this good friend of the show, who listens to this show, he'll go by the name of Foz. He basically has recently gone directly authorized, so I'm calling him Foz, that's his nickname. We all know him, sorry, we all know him, apart from Carl on the show. He's been advising at least 30 years, and he's a really decent advisor, you know, he's worked at a very large London firm, you know, top of his game, managing people. He's very smart on regulation teams, super client focused, great financial planner, knows about investing, blah blah blah. He went out on his own, probably about seven or eight years ago, I could get the timing wrong, and he was an AR, so he worked underneath another friend of ours, and then over the last sort of year, 18 months, he decided to go directly authorized. Now, if there was ever a candidate, a poster boy, post a person for the perfect person to go directly authorized, and it should be as smooth as possible, you know, it's, it's false, basically. And on a recent little gathering that me and Alan Marat, he sort of shared a few of the stories about going directly authorized, and it sounded quite arduous and quite painful, and a lot of the things he thought they were going to focus on they didn't, and they picked him up on loads of stuff that he didn't think they were going to question, and bearing in mind he's got a mature client bank, mature revenue, been in the business ages, and it was quite a tricky challenge for him to do it, he finally did do it, and he's got through, but also I think there's a few more checkpoints they want once he becomes directly authorized. Six months' time he needs to say that he's adhere to the business plan that's been agreed, then a year down the line. So it's not a, I suppose it's a word of caution. Going directly authorized is a goal for a lot of people, a lot of teams, a lot of individuals, but yeah, you certainly have to have your, your ducks in a row, that's why a lot of these networks have grown valid path has grown so large in the last few years, and also scents, and also new leafs. So there is stepping stones to get directly authorized, but yeah, I thought I'd mentioned his, his, his story, and if anyone's thinking about doing it, and maybe wants to speak to Fars, I'm sure we'll be open to having that conversation with you. So that's all they could buy our

Nick Lincoln: 1:01:33

businesses, they could buy our squeaky clean directly authorized businesses, can't they? Oh, yes,

Andy Hart: 1:01:37

that's the potential of the cards.

Alan Smith: 1:01:40

Yes, I remember the conversation. I was, I wasn't surprised that it's difficult to get directly authorized. We know already that it is. We know a few other people who have tried and unfortunately didn't succeed, but it's the ongoing I thought was just really.. I mean, all right, taking a step back from all this, it's good, it's positive, it reduces the number of sharks and cowboys in our game who just able to very much so get directly authorized. So, it's, you know, I guess from an industry perspective, you'd rather have some real detailed due diligence than not, but as you say, when you, when you know someone like Foz, and he's just like an absolute top guy, and it just, you know, fully ethical, and all the rest of it. It's just ongoing, you can't just deliver your business plan and they say, right, you're authorized, or even with loads of, and he got a lot of support from, you know, from compliance people and stuff to submit his application ongoing, but it's the fact that they're going to be continuing to very closely monitor him for I think for several years post directly authorization he

Andy Hart: 1:02:41

was quite fortunate he worked at another firm so it didn't quite matter that it took a long time but if you were had left a firm and your you know entire financial future career income depends on getting authorized and they're you know getting you to jump through necessary hoops, and it just taken ages. I'm sure you'll be a lot more stressed out about it. So, he was less stressed, but if it's taken him, who's, you know, top, top, top advisor, that long, that much did they not

Nick Lincoln: 1:03:09

make any allowances for Fozzie's career? I mean, that's sort of, that's the body of evidence that we're just, that's maybe,

Andy Hart: 1:03:14

maybe not Nick, you know, they might have just treated it like any other application, these boxes around your advisor, but yeah,

Alan Smith: 1:03:23

but the regulatory environment changed quite dramatically a few years ago, when you had RDR, then you've had subsequent legislation since then, senior managers regime is the big one, and either you know it or not, we've all got the same functions as, like, the CEO of Barclays, for example. That's what a compliance person told me. You, we are all judged at the same level, so unless you've got sufficient experience, knowledge, resources, access to information, and I think that's where people do fall down, because you get interviewed by a panel of the regulators of the FCA, you get interviewed, and it's, you know, it's a live interview, and they ask you lots of questions. What are you doing about your CF this, and you did it to that? You really have to know your stuff, even though in reality most of us rely upon external or internal compliance support, but that's that is that it's a very high bar now to get directly authorized, but it's as I say, it's not just getting across the line, it's the ongoing highly, you know, very, very close monitoring for years afterwards. So, yeah, it's good story, Andrew.

Nick Lincoln: 1:04:28

Yep, go on. Okay, let's close this topical tidbit section off of episode 100 with you, mr. Wadja.

Carl Widger: 1:04:36

No, I said leave that one out, Nick. I did send you a message, so we'll chat, but he's not really watching. He's not really on his game today. Very chosen,

Andy Hart: 1:04:47

sharp,

Nick Lincoln: 1:04:47

but didn't shop. Okay, right. Okay, in that case, then we'll move. Well, listen, we get 63 minutes. We've.. that's a.. I mean, to be honest, that advisor happiness section could have been unmeated potatoes for today's show, because that was it,

Andy Hart: 1:04:57

could have actually, yeah,

Nick Lincoln: 1:05:00

but it wasn't, so instead we will go on to our meat and potatoes, and we'll keep this quick if we can, guys, because we're at 64 minutes, and I've got a planning meeting to go to after this, so, but we're just gonna have a reflect, you know, I'm not a big one for these kind of things, but the guys wanted to talk about the fact we got to episode 100 and just really the highlights of our journey here. That's the best part of four years of doing knocking out this stuff on a bi-weekly basis, and to pick highlights, and to sort of think about, I'm struggling with it. The whole thing has been amazing. It's just like me, the highlight is the whole thing. The trap is the highlight, it's the community, it's working with you guys. There's no particular episode. I mean, all the SJP ones did really well. The Turkish Fire Alarm one is the one I saw. So many people coming in, saying, 'What's that noise in the back? When I was driving along, I heard the bloody alarm. For

Alan Smith: 1:05:52

those who didn't hear, I did an episode from my hotel room in Turkey, and there was, it wasn't a fire alarm, it was like a smoke detector whose battery had run out. Yeah, does that really annoying incessant every 30 seconds, beep? And I do remember there was there was one guy just listening to it, walking around his house, checking all his smoke alarms, what the hell, taking the batteries up and.

Carl Widger: 1:06:16

Back in

Andy Hart: 1:06:17

the thing that might have been funny, if he was listening to it in headphones, that beat would have been following him around, you know? If the beat was in the kitchen elector or something, you just.. you're like, "Shit, it's in the bathroom now.

Nick Lincoln: 1:06:32

So, guys, well, who wants to go? Who wants to give their reflections on the past near four years?

Alan Smith: 1:06:36

I'll just jump in quickly, because you're right, we're just.. we don't want to indulge ourselves in this too much and talk about it, but I've really loved, and there's been a lot of stories about this, but I've really, really enjoyed the opportunity. We seem like, and you've just alluded to it, Nick, it seems like this is a kind of central community of people, and some people are looking for something, some people are offering something, and the classic example is finding, and it kind of refers back to the advisor happiness survey. What has been determined through our conversations, and we all get lots of direct messages and emails and contacts, is that there are a there's advisors working at firms that they don't love working in, because the advisors themselves are real proponents of full fat financial planning. They want to do the work that we talk about every other week on this podcast, but for whatever reason, and it's, you know, it's a commercial decision, but their employers just don't do it, they don't embrace it, so they're looking for to change, so we've been able to connect people, and there are also career changers, so people who've been in other walks of life, and we know there was a, there's a school teacher who found financial planning, and there's been quite a number over the years. The one that really sticks out for me, and to give him a specific name call and shout out, is Matt Spivey, because he, you know, he was working, I think, from memory in telecoms, you know, entirely different industry,

Nick Lincoln: 1:08:05

yeah,

Alan Smith: 1:08:06

obviously had an interest and a passion for personal finance, and stumbled across Trap, starts listening to it, and then you'll recall that one of our earlier episodes we were saying about, you know, trying to find another employer, what have you, and we just all came up with the idea, don't just send in a random three line email or a boring word document CV, do something more, go the extra mile, you know, create your personal website, create a short form video, do something which differentiates yourself. Well, Matt listened to that, and he did exactly that. Remember, he built his own website. He built, he shared his business plan on his website. He created a video, created a bit of content, mentioned it. We give him a shout out on the podcast, and as we have mentioned in the past, he's ended up at a great firm near in Yorkshire, near where he lives. So, that there's dozens of stories like that, but that's one specific one that I think we've really added a lot of value to the community, and we've helped one individual in particular and one firm, so that has been a highlight to me, as well as all the other support we've given to other advisors on their journey.

Carl Widger: 1:09:14

Watch anything to add? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I can't actually believe we got to 100 If you look at our YouTube channel, there's some YouTube shorts that are like kind of almost outtakes, and that will give you a sense of what actually happens, because even this morning we were half an hour trying to get the tech working right, and there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of funny stuff that goes on, and it's just, you know, we do have a laugh, and this thing, no matter how busy I've ever been coming into going, oh Jesus Christ, I have to record trap, it just gives me energy, and the reason it gives me energy is because we're all kind of like whatever way we all come around to it, we're all trying to do the right thing and do really great work for our clients, and I think that's why there's a like it's almost not a community, it's almost like a cult, and you know it's it's it's a whole movement almost that people have been looking for something to kind of hang on to, and, and it's, and it's small, and it's niche, and it always will, and that's why we get some of the trolls, because they're outside, they're probably not doing it the way, and I love the trolls, I just, I love them, I, they give me loads of energy, go giggle, you know, and it's like, I think I'll just leave that one just hang there again, right? Because it's like, it's just, wow, have you nothing good to say yourself that you have to come in and tell me I'm stupid because I don't know about cryptocurrency, which I've been proven right about again and again, but anyway, this but, but look, probably a highlight for me was a trap live this year that Eva came along and three of my four kids, and you know, like with your kids, you're just, you're just your dad, and it's like I'm just dad, and then they come to this thing and go. To Jesus, this is kind of a, this is kind of a big deal, and you're actually doing quite well, and that you actually spoke reasonably well on the stage, kind of thing. So it was just, it was just cool to, was almost like a bring your kids to work day, right? But, um, but yeah, there's, there's a, there's, there's loads of stuff, and I get loads of these random messages from people I don't know on LinkedIn, thanking me for something, or saying your point was really well made, and the odd one saying that I don't agree, and blah blah blah, that's okay too, but yeah, I just think my overriding sense here is I cannot believe we got to 100 and the fact that we got to 100 we probably were so bloody stubborn, that means we'll go to 1000 or something ridiculous. Four whole years of this mental, but thank you guys. I've really loved the journey so far.

Nick Lincoln: 1:12:06

Thank you as well. Well said. I'll try anything to say.

Andy Hart: 1:12:09

Yeah, I'll chip in. So, yeah, I mean, the trolls are quite interesting, aren't they? It's clear that they consume a shed load of our content, you know what Alan said at minute 37 is slightly not technically true, based on the new legislation that came in. He's a complete and utter arsehole.

Carl Widger: 1:12:26

You've got some technical stuff just totally wrong, and I think it's a disgrace. You should not be coming to

Alan Smith: 1:12:35

listen to Trap for detailed, complex technical advice, if

Andy Hart: 1:12:39

you do your thinking in public and produce hundreds of hours of shared information, of course, you're going to get a few things wrong every so often anyway. But yes, I mean, yeah, we got to 100 shows. I think it's a huge celebration. I mean, not many shows get to 100 shows, you know. We've showed up every two weeks, we've done what we said we're going to do. We are still friends, just a few hairy moments, a few toys being thrown out the WhatsApp group pram every so often, but yeah, I'm taken aback by the reception and the ongoing growth of the podcast. You know, it was clearly needed, the community, the profession was obviously wanting something like this to be put out there inside financial advice, let's call it, and I believe the best thing we're doing is uniting the profession, as in younger advisors listen to us, people outside the profession, older people, independent firms, restricted firms, employed advisors, para planners, you know, raising all ships, as it were, and I think we're having a big impact on it. For me, specific ones, Nick in Sicily was a bit of a highlight. Obviously, we need, we need our main man to show up and do the drop, so he does shoot her off before, before, before we went live, I think I done every show. Nick might know, I think Nick, you've done every show, Alan. Yeah, Carl's missed a few. Anyway, we've all massively committed. Yeah, so the Sicily was a highlight for me. Trap live has been amazing. We've done it three times, and I think we've nailed it now. So I'm happy we're going to the same venue next year, we'll, you know, spend a bit more time trying to make sure that show is the best it can be, but in terms of, yeah, the logistics and the venue, that's going to be, you know, hopefully ticking the box, so yeah, we'll just work a bit harder at it, yeah, so onwards to 200 shows, guys, yeah, thank you very much, and thank you very much for listening, everyone,

Nick Lincoln: 1:14:37

yeah, indeed,

Andy Hart: 1:14:38

Nicholas, or someone.

Nick Lincoln: 1:14:39

Okay, thank you. And then we've got plans, plans for rolling out this trap thing in various ways over the over the coming months and years. Good stuff. Okay, so I've got - I'm a bit time scarce today, and my apologies for that. Let's move straight on to the Trappist questions. This is where we answer a question from our beloved Trappist audience. You can submit a question by the pinned tweet on X, the pinned X on Twitter, whatever you want to call it, and or in the show called Show Notes, there's a link there to click and submit your question. We will get to it, we answer them in order. So we're still a few months behind, but we're going to do this one. And this is from, who is this from? It's a nice, it's a nice envelope. This is from someone called Tom L, who's not got a social handle. It's a long question. Thanks for this one, Tom. I don't think Tom's in the profession in this thing of ours from reading it. Hello, dear Trap. I'm one of those end users who stumbled upon your podcast and have listened back through every episode whilst running. Just fantastic stuff, six out of five stars. Thank you. There's our review. I have a question about helping people who need financial advice, but are too stubborn to admit they need it. My father is a proud, independent man, but he's struggling to move forward with IHT planning due to behavioral issues. He wants to minimize the bill, but doesn't want to use any allowances because he thinks they're too small, and he doesn't want to follow their rules. I'm warming to your dad already, Tom. He's also struggling to draw from his pension because he doesn't want to pay income tax. He's fixated on doing something with the house and his approach is based on random articles from experienced IHT barristers. Oh God, when I say we shouldn't try to make specific plans based on general articles, he says things like we don't need an advisor, they're for people with complex family situations like second wives. I'm worried we'll face an IHT bill so high that we'll generally genuinely struggle to pay it is. Anything we can do, I just want to come on that final point, and I'll throw out the trap pack. The IHT bill is only ever at most 40% of the estate, less exemptions, so you still gonna have 60% left behind. You can always pay the IHT bill. It might mean you have to be a forced seller of prized beloved assets like the family home, but if you've got an IHT bill, it means you've got assets, and it's only ever gonna be 40% you have 6% left. Yeah, that point I don't get, but I think the behavioral stuff, yes, it's very diverse. People get older, they get more stubborn, don't they? I'm sure we know that with our, with our parents, we notice that with our parents, they'd get more entrenched in their ways. And

Carl Widger: 1:16:52

yes, I was thinking, we don't have to look to our more stubborn. We just..

Andy Hart: 1:17:00

well, I was born.. I was born stubborn, and I'm not getting any better. But you know, again, this.. you know that I actually planning with the house.. that just.. that's a massive red flag. Just be very careful about that with guys. Anything to add to this? Anything to respond to this question? I mean, it's probably not gonna be very helpful in this situation, but you can only help people who want to help themselves. Yeah, as I think Carl mentioned, we, or Alan mentioned, we generally want to help people by default, but you can only help people who want to help themselves. And we come across loads of different things in life, and if you start trying to help someone, trying to lead them down a road, you're just going to waste your time. So you learn that just with experience, I think over time, if people come to me genuinely say I need some help, and I want you to spend three hours explaining something to me, or I need to do this, that, and the other, I'm there. If I just see a problem and I think, right, I'm going to butt in here and try and help this person, if they don't help themselves, it's very hard. But

Carl Widger: 1:17:52

sorry, I didn't read the question earlier, and I'm really sorry. Is this this guy's talking about his father-in-law. No, his

Andy Hart: 1:17:59

father, I think. So, this is a

Alan Smith: 1:18:00

non-advisor. He's an end user talking about his dad.

Carl Widger: 1:18:05

I don't know if his mom was alive, maybe to talk to his mom, like his dad may have preconceived notions that Tom of him looking. Yeah,

Andy Hart: 1:18:14

he needs a third opinion for

Carl Widger: 1:18:16

money. It needs to come from the body of his, who's a less financial advice. That's

Alan Smith: 1:18:21

what I was thinking. Two quick points on this one. This thing about hiring advisors only for complex and situations with second wives, and what have you. We've talked about this, you know, the new legislation, and as it applies to your home and the tax allowances, and now your pension falling into the tax bracket, stuff. It is getting ridiculously complex, and yes, you're right, Nick. In terms of this, should always be sufficient assets to pay the tax bill, but you might be waiting a long time and unwinding all that stuff, and you're going to incur penalties and late payment fees, and God knows what else, so it is complex, and planning does help with this. What I read, the I read the question earlier, and I don't think you want to be bashing your dad over the head with statistics and facts and charts and all that sort of stuff. What do you think stories work, and just joining the joining the doctor in what Carl was just has just said for the guy? guy who, who wrote in with the question, does he have any, does he have friends of his generation whose parents have engaged more, they have done some planning work, and then there's a story you can tell, do you know that you know Bob and Mary down the road, they, what they did was this, that, and the other, I think just somehow, just dropping in a few stories, real-life experiences, people that they know, or that the dad knows, or knows of, you know, nothing complex, and but they did a couple of things, which just help and keep, and it depends on the dad's kind of motivation to it, because ultimately, if he doesn't want to do anything, and he's aware that the tax man will become the single biggest beneficiary of his life's work and his estate, and his career. If he's okay with that, yeah, then you have to, you're gonna have to live with it. But I think narratives and storytelling, and examples of others that he knows and knows of, is probably your only hope there.

Andy Hart: 1:20:16

I mean, it's pretty staggering. This is the point we mentioned earlier. I mean, he's an end user, and he stumbled across the podcast, and has now listened back through every episode, and now given us a six out of five star. He must be interested in this world of money and world of finance, and later on down the line, he may decide to pursue a career in this or not, but it's pretty crazy that someone from the outside of this profession goes back and listens through 99 episodes.

Alan Smith: 1:20:42

People have got an interest in personal finance, haven't they? Yes. And this is, you know, this is a behind the scenes look instead of a no, I get it for dot version

Andy Hart: 1:20:50

chewing the fat about all right. All right, yes. Next, move

Nick Lincoln: 1:20:54

on. Okay, let's move on to what many people call culture cord.

Alan Smith: 1:21:03

Okay, I haven't got the thing in front of me. I guess it's me first. I just want to do a very quick shout out, because I met the guy a couple of weeks ago, Andrew Craig. You may have seen him apply. He's got a, he's got a whole kind of. Of community, he's a best-selling author. Does anyone else know any best-selling authors on this podcast? No, but Andrew Craig is, and his business is called Plain English Finance. He broadly supports our thoughts. He believes in financial planning. He's not 100% sold on index investing. He believes there are opportunities, but he's got his own. He's relatively recently launched his YouTube channel, and it's getting some significant traction. I just think it's really good. It's worth checking out Andrew Craig. There's a link to in the show notes, Plain English Finance, and also he gave me a gift of, he's got about two or three books, but his, I think it's originally the well-selling book, yeah, How to Buy the World, I think,

Andy Hart: 1:21:57

yeah,

Alan Smith: 1:21:58

which I guess is what we believe in, buying the world. So, check out Andy Craig and Plain English Finance and his YouTube channel. Thank you.

Nick Lincoln: 1:22:06

Thanks. Mine is from Abe's Abraham Aukens, and news podcast and advisor 3.0 and it's a, it's a live recording of a session that took place at his events, which happens the day after Trapp Live in May, and next year also we had Trap Live again, and Abe's events the day after. So make a big jolly in the city if you want to. Anyway, good session on AI, and their guests on stage, Sarah Ruffs Edge, Matt Pitcher, and Dan Haylett, who's just some really good content, and the empathy delusion, and it was an interesting discussion. Dan Hale, saying don't think that your advisors can swerve AI just because you've got this empathy thing going on with your clients, because that's now I'm not sure I necessarily agree with it, but it's a really good discussion. Maybe we're listening, by the way, get the bloody levels on your podcast sorted out, they're so quiet at the volume at max. Anyway, that's mine.

Andy Hart: 1:22:58

Okay, to close this out. Show 100 I don't know if you boys have come across this podcast. It's run by Rick Rubin, the famous music producer. It's called Tetragrammaton, or Tetragrammaton. He's got Bill Gurley on recently, who is a step-in on the All In podcast. Very smart, smart individual, I like to listen to, so check it. Yeah, the Tetragrammaton podcast is amazing. He gets some really interesting characters to his Malibu ranch, and they have good conversations about various things. So, do check the whole podcast out. But specifically, the one I mentioned, it is Bill Gurley. Thank you very much. Over and out. Goodbye. See you. Episode 200 Nicholas. Indeed,

Nick Lincoln: 1:23:37

there's indeed your Trappers. Thank you. As episode 100 thing disappears on the view, Benda, Father Time, it's Adios. Take care out there. We'll see you on the other side. Goodbye. Thank you for your support and love over the last 100 episodes.

Alan Smith: 1:23:52

Thank you. Goodbye. 100

Carl Widger: 1:23:54

and counting,

Alan Smith: 1:23:58

amazing. Amazing, we got through that. Amazing,

Andy Hart: 1:24:00

that was rocky stuff.

Carl Widger: 1:24:04

100