James ConeyFeb 12 2020

SJP has moved on from its cult meetings

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Held in the past at the Royal Albert Hall and, most recently, the O2, it is renowned for being a celebration of sales, where the advisers who have flogged the most pensions and investments are hauled up on stage and lauded.

In the past, partners were treated as celebrities and shared the stage with guests such as Bill Clinton and David Beckham. 

Gone was the celebration of individual sales. Out of the window went excess

Previous attendees have described it to me as a cult meeting – where staff are told over and over again how brilliant they are, that they are doing important work, that they are the best.

This year’s ACM, held on the last Friday in January, was a very different affair.

Gone was the celebration of individual sales. Out of the window went excess. 

The talk from chief executive Andrew Croft and the managing director was of change and how to prepare the business for the future.

And when SJP changes, everyone else in the industry should sit up and take note.

It is overhauling the way advisers are paid, it has made efforts to make charges more transparent, and a very expensive rebrand is in the offing.

I would be surprised to see winged lions and country houses for much longer.

Regular readers of this column and of The Sunday Times newspaper section I edit will know I have been the loudest critic of SJP.

But it is changing, and for the better.

There is much more to be done, particularly on charges.

I wish in particular that it would stop levying upfront charges on monthly savers, which seems like a particular penalty on prudence.

I wish its early withdrawal charge of up to 6 per cent was explained far better (there are, I understand, particular regulatory reasons why this has not been possible).

And I wish that if it really does charge 2.99 per cent upfront on average instead of the advertised 5 per cent, that it would just say so.

Changing adviser pay structures is a particularly important move in that it incentivises the right kind of behaviour.

And although SJP will not have liked the timing of the comments made by Dame Helena Morrissey, its new non-executive director, about charges, they do at least mark a moment of independence from a board member.

Yes, things are changing.

Because of its scale, SJP has the power to shift the market.

The debate over whether you should publish your charges goes on, but when SJP makes this move towards transparency, it is effectively setting a standard that everyone else should watch.

Particularly if it uses its influence to push for change at the regulator.

What SJP is really after though is shifting wealth. Its changes reflect a future where intergenerational transfers of money start to have an effect.

For a younger generation, one that is becoming engaged with robo-advice and passive investing, and where financial advisers are an irrelevance, how to find a footing in this world is going to be all-important.

What is a financial adviser to the younger generation?

Older advisers with independent businesses may not care about this.

But SJP is a FTSE100 company that has to build for the future – other advisers would do well to do the same.

Use power wisely

Hargreaves Lansdown is clearly still reeling from the Woodford affair – at least, that is my interpretation of its latest accounts.

And changes are afoot here too. Out goes the Wealth 50 and in comes an independent board member to its wealth management arm to help pick stocks on the best buy lists.

What a mess.

One of the great arguments in favour of the Wealth lists was that they demonstrate HL’s power to negotiate lower fees for their customers.

But if HL’s bargaining power is so mighty, why is it largely only the Wealth 50 funds that have a discount? 

Surely its power for good should apply to all funds, whether it has tipped them or not.

Which do you want first?

One of the questions I always get asked is: why do journalists only ever write bad news?

My answer is this: would it be better if we assumed people were essentially always trying to do the right thing and only reported on it when they did something wrong?

Or should we assume everyone is fundamentally bad and only report when something is good?

I know which I think is the most cynical.

James Coney is money editor of The Times and The Sunday Times