Dave Mason

Obviously, you go back in time with RDR, a lot of the big financial institutions exited the advice market, really.

It was a reputational risk and became very costly and difficult.

And that kind of created the fragmentation in the first place.

I think the world has moved on a lot.

I think credit to it's been difficult from a regulatory aspect with consumer duty.

But actually, overall, that has improved the standard of financial service and improved the quality of advice that firms are now giving.

So I think putting all these things together in terms of who's going to have the balance sheet in deep enough pockets and the appetite to go back in to serving multiple segments, as Donald said, I think focus their reason on the banks as to how they might reenter that market.

And I think where that speaks to the advice gap is they, of course, have very large client bases at all different range of segments.

I think the interesting thing for our industry now is there someone out there who can piece all of this together.

to have a very low-cost, efficient, simplified advice or targeted support on areas of the segment that don't necessarily want a face-to-face advisor and can be delivered digitally, but then all the way up to that full-service advice that in the high net worth segment people want.

I think the banks entering could be an interesting phase, and I think that will be good for the market and address that advice gap.

Yeah, and I think it's good.

But going back to the findings of the report and the rationales, of course, the reason firms come together are often driven by commercial drivers, which is economies of scale.

So it's getting harder and harder to operate in this market with good margin because there is a lot more regulation, a lot more complexity in the world of financial services and in financial advice in particular.

And then you've got things like increasing challenges around cyber and complexity of propositions.

So all of that puts a

big demand on organizations to be able to invest in technology and and deliver the benefits from technology while still preserving a margin so therefore the argument says if you bring businesses together you have more capacity to invest in those technologies there is a small counter to that which is it's not always a cost say by bringing businesses together so some of the firms have been acquired when they move from a smaller medium-sized enterprise business to become more enterprise

Often that's bringing in technology that may not have needed or used before.

So just a word of caution there, if people are looking at smaller firms, it's not always about a cost save on the technology side.

But yeah, I think in terms of what technology can deliver, I mean, of course, the big buzzword in the hyper curve is the use of AI.