It is the autumn finance conference season; a chance to take stock of where things are before all the usual end-of-year stock takes. Think of this as the pre-stocktake-stocktake, or don’t – I can’t control what you get up to in your own time.
I recently found myself talking at three conferences in two days, all on different subjects. It doesn’t really matter what they were; what matters for our purposes today is – entirely accidentally – they sort of all ended up being about the same thing.
Anyone who lived through the last couple of decades, from the first stirrings under Callum McCarthy’s floofy Gleneagles duvet of RDR, through the commission and cash rebate bans and into MiFID overdisclosure and now Consumer Duty, knows that one of the most fundamental changes we’ve seen is that planners and advisers are no longer proposition takers – you’re proposition makers.
The process of making sure you pick suitable tax wrappers and investments has endured – though it’s much, much more complex now – but there are a slew of ancillary things for you to work through.
You’re the closest to the client, and you construct a universe in which you and your client live.
The industry – all the providers, tech firms, MPS shops and all the rest of it – look in from the outside and wonder if there are any wee wormholes through which they can wriggle so they’re part of it too.
There are a staggering number of combinations of ‘things’ that firms bring together in constructing their own universes
You’re a planner, you’re an adviser, but, more than anything, you’re a universe-maker. The problem: no-one trains you for that.
There is no CF exam or undergraduate degree you can sit that will show you how to navigate the complex interplay of propositional elements that go into making a modern planning firm. There is not, in summary, an app for that.
And so, it’s no surprise that there are an almost infinite number of parallel universes that advisers and planners have created. That’s not true – the number is finite, not almost infinite, and infinity is a binary state like uniqueness, or pregnancy.
But rhetoric should still be allowed to have its day, and it is true there are a staggering number of combinations of ‘things’ that firms bring together in constructing their own universes.
This isn’t how they did it over on Magrathea, where Slartibartfast learned his planet-building craft.
I bet he had all kinds of CPD, on-job learning programmes and personal development modules; perhaps that’s where he found the time to work on the Norwegian fjords.
He described them as “a bit fiddly”, and I wonder if that isn’t the equivalent of, say, making sure your cashflow planning tool output speaks to your CRM system without requiring advanced contortionist capabilities.
(If you’re not a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan, that last paragraph will make no sense. But don’t worry, it’ll all work out in the end.)
Both financial planning and universe-building are art rather than science, though both have plenty of science involved
Slarty was woken from a five-million-year sleep to work on the Earth v2.0; this needed doing because the Earth was actually a supercomputer designed to help find the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. So when it was destroyed to make room for an interplanetary bypass, that was inconvenient.
A total reinvention of what had gone before, with the chance to make long-desired improvements? That’s ringing a bell or two.
The parallels keep coming. No-one appreciates the work that goes into something fiddly like fjords; no client truly appreciates the grunt that goes into all the different elements of their experience when they work with a planner. Nor should they; the end effect in both cases is what matters, and the craftsperson’s craft remains largely hidden.
Both financial planning and universe-building are art rather than science, though both have plenty of science involved. Neither the planner nor the interplanetary architect can know exactly how things will turn out, but both recognise good when they see it.
As Slartibartfast says, “Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
Perhaps, as we take stock and start to think about next year, it’s time to remember that universe-makers don’t have a map, or a formula, or a proof.
They just have the sense of doing the right thing, being at the centre of the universe, and tying everything together in the belief that things will work out fine. I can think of much worse unifying narratives.
Mark Polson is founder and chief executive of the lang cat
