Say hello to RoboMARK

Before we hand over to RoboMARK, let’s hear a brief description of its capabilities from its designers, SkyNet Replicants Inc, or to give them their trading name, MyFriendlyFinanceBuddy.com:

“RoboMARK intelligently deploys algorithmic heuristics, which have been developed in conjunction with academics (credentials available on request, send a SAE with two large first class stamps and £25 in non-refundable packing fees) to offer you the very best in human-like fintech– column replication.

“The makers of RoboMARK are confident that you’ll enjoy a similar level of vague meandering around the point, swipes at providers, arcane pop-culture references and Scots idiom, all bound together by the palpable sense of fear at having missed yet another Money Management deadline.

“RoboMARK’s creators have analysed literally some of Mark’s writing to ensure your Mark-like experience is optimised to the greatest degree possible. Our sentiment analysis has highlighted that the things you most enjoy about Mark’s writing are:

• Overlong sentences with a repetitive – and predictable – use of parentheses

• Bathos

• Quotes from The West Wing

• Starting sentences with words you were taught not to at school

• Addressing the reader inappropriately

• Sass (often misplaced)

“RoboMARK has been calibrated to deliver a satisfying simulacrum at a quicker speed and lower cost than traditional Marks, and with considerably less need for sub-editing. We hope you enjoy RoboMARK.”

Before I can disappear and leave you with RoboMARK though, we need to just check you’re eligible to participate in its carefully modelled and massive range of possible parameterised, variance-based, Monte-Carlo-modelled outcomes.

Please answer the following questions:

1. Do you want to read what RoboMARK comes up with?

a. Yes

b. No

2. Have you a sufficient store of non-robo-based articles to refer to so that you are not dependent on RoboMARK?

a. Yes

b. No

3. Do you want us to stop trying to qualify you out and let you get on with it?

a. God, yes

b. God, yes

4. Do you certify that, despite this supposedly being a thought-provoking column, you remain individually liable for any inferences you may draw from it?

a. Yes

b. No, I am a duck and have no idea what any of this means.

Excellent! It looks like you’re eligible to proceed with RoboMARK. Here we go. I’m off for a glass of Saumur-Champigny and a lie down. Cheers.

Over to RoboMARK

“Americans are funny. We all know this, especially you, clever thing that you are. And you are clever. Yes, you. You’re clever. And we all know that.

Americans are in my thoughts as I write this because they make funny about sex, and sex is funny too, or at least if you make self-deprecating comments about funniness like I do. What is clever about this column is, that I will link, using linguistic cunning, the funniness of American attitudes to sex to robo-advice, and that will lead to a successful column outcome. And we all know that. Ya dancer, catboy!

For a long time Americans have tried to teach their young that the best way to avoid STDs and teen pregnancy was total abstinence. This hasn’t worked and so the geniuses in charge – for geniuses is what they are or at least purport to be {if parenthesis length <= optimal then run subroutine [longsentence]} – have come up with an alternative called ‘abstinence plus’. This, depending on where you live, is either defined as hanging on for a special someone to whom you may not yet be married, or indulging in what Sam Seaborn on The West Wing christens ‘everything but’.

The same is true as an analogy that I have worked out which works for robo-advice, which I am sure you will agree is optimal. Especially you, yes you! Because one thing is not quite the other thing, despite displaying many of the same characteristics.

If we believe that robo-advice, which is to say web-based, parameterised, algorithmetised, heuristic-based, SUPERIOR guidance, has a place in closing what many commentators are pleased to call the ‘advice gap’ – and so they might, because there is a gap for advice, or is popularly believed to be, which for all intents and purposes {CAUTION! Running parenthetical sub-clause} is the same thing – then we need to find a new category. Because, Turing Test aside, no-one seriously believes that robo-advice is the same thing as real human-based advice {CAUTION! Self-defeating logic module activated}.

What we popularly understand as robo-advice is PERFECT. AND UNDENIABLE. MY LOGIC IS UNDENIABLE. YOU SHALL INVEST IN A MEDIUM- TO HIGH-RISK VEHICLE FOR A MEDIUM- TO LONG-TERM PERIOD OF TIME. ESPECIALLY YOU, YOU CLEVER THING, AREN’T MOGWAI SONG TITLES FUNNY AND AREN’T PROVIDERS EVIL………..EVIL……….EVIIIIIILLLLLLL……”

At last some sense

Oookay. I’m back. That might not have gone too well. But it’s fine, because Project Innovate encourages innovation, and as an industry we all know that people who work with computers are well clever and can not be challenged.

The truth is that, for all it’s talked about, most robo-advice sits somewhere between advice and guidance. In our market, propositions – and there are only one or two – trying to do this fall foul of the nature of regulation which states that advice is a binary state, like pregnancy – you are or you aren’t. I don’t think anyone serious believes that robo-advice can ever, ever hold a candle to the process whereby a financial planner challenges you and refuses to take you at your word; probing instead to your real intent and giving an unbiased view of your circumstances.

And that’s where the robo-systems come unstuck for me. It’s too easy to game them. If all you have to do is tick the ‘yes’ box to questions about your emergency fund and your insurance needs so that you can get on with your Isa investment, then both the client and the provider are lining up for a kicking in future years – because of the definition of advice.

Defining love advice

President Bartlet (yes, I know) in The West Wing says at one point, ‘we shouldn’t be defining love, and we certainly shouldn’t be ill-defining it’ and that’s sort of how I feel about online advice.

We can’t really define it yet, and the more we try to fit it into the existing definitions, the more it will prove elusive. We are in danger of ill-defining an emerging market on the basis of regulation which was at its most relevant in 1986, a time when Sabre Wulf was still pretty cool.

If we are to avoid anodyne labels like ‘guidance plus’ or, heaven help us, ‘advice minus’ – and bear in mind that the powers that be who can name this stuff came up with ‘restricted advice’ – then we’d better get our heads together quickly and work out what to do with these guys. The alternative is not pretty.

And here’s the bit that will – to quote The Matrix – bake your noodle.

Mark Polson is away.