Member Article

LEBC chief speaks to Canadian industry leaders

Speaking at the Investors Economics Executive Forum in Toronto, Canada for Canadian wealth management leaders, Jack McVitie, Chief Executive of National IFA, LEBC Group, talked about how regulatory reform in the UK had impacted on advisers and the wealth management sector.

McVitie highlighted that the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) was among the first worldwide to trigger wide-ranging reforms aimed at redrawing the relationships between advisers, product-manufacturers and investors. He explained how LEBC had dealt with the Retail Distribution Reform (RDR) to cope and then thrive in a world with no embedded fees, new professional standards and increasing fee transparency.

In particular, he covered the question of when advisers should jump from old model certainty into new model uncertainty but with long term sustainability. And as always there were questions around the efficacy of change to the anticipated new model because current systems and processes did not necessarily support such a move. There was a reference to bionic, advice where technology and a human interface with the client can be used to deliver solutions, which is designed to offer considerably more people access to independent financial advice.

Concluding, McVitie said, “Our experience is that once you get on the other side of RDR you look at processes and think, how could we have allowed so much “shoe leather and paper” to remain in the advisory process. The answer for me tends to be manufacturers capital supporting market inefficiencies for their own short term aims.

“Some advisers will simply take this cost out over time and build even better lifestyle businesses, others will build new businesses that have an ambition for greater scale and reach. As far as I’m concerned, the future belongs to the advisers.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by LEBC Group Ltd .