If there’s one point about money, and communications about money, that I’ve made more often than all others put together, it is that in real life people don’t find these things “unengaging” or dull.  As I’ve said a thousand times, money engages people passionately.   It’s just our stuff – communications from the financial services industry - that renders them comatose.

You may say that this is a bit of a cheat because the issues on my mind are to do with other people’s financial misbehaviour, which will always be an infinitely hotter topic than our own needs for more investments or insurance.  But in the next million years, I don’t think there’ll ever be a better double-act in support of my contention than Fred the Shred’s pension, immediately followed by the House of Commons’ expenses.

To my certain knowledge, there are six major foreign financial institutions planning major launches into the UK IFA market over the next few months.  (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were at least as many more flying in under my radar.)

Which, given the current poor performance and clouded outlook of that market, is a bit of a surprise. 

It’s true that on their way in, they’ll meet one or two representatives of the last wave on their way out.  The Hartford, of course, are clearing their Canary Wharf desks and taking their personal effects back to Connecticut.  And the UBS-ites involve in their short-lived wrap business are pretty much a memory now, and from the point of view of the IFAs who supported them not a particularly happy one.   But the new incomers, while realising that previous experience does mean that demonstrating long-term commitment is a vitally important challenge, are otherwise not disconcerted.

Are they right to have such confidence?  Impossible to say.  On the downside, the market is hardly under-served:  IFAs have certainly hundreds, and I’d say very likely getting on for a thousand, product providers keen to do business with them.  And everyone says that the outlook for IFAs themselves is extremely bleak, with up to a half of them likely to go out of business in the next five years through a combination of business pressures, regulatory pressures and simple old age and infirmity.

On the upside, though, IFAs do still have a remarkable stranglehold on the UK affluent and high net worth market – for people with money in this country, they are pretty much the only game in town.  And although they’re served by a huge number of providers, at every level the overall standard of service remains poor, and extraordinarily easy for new entrants to beat.

It’ll be interesting to see.  Probably a mixed result, one suspects, with a couple of the newcomers succeeding triumphantly, a couple staggering bravely on while underperforming against all their targets, and a couple heading rapidly back to their equivalents of Connecticut and Zurich.  I wonder if the winners will be the ones we’re working with.

As I mentioned, on Monday I was at a conference attended by all the top mortgage intermediaries.  Their industry is in dire straits – adviser numbers are down by getting on for half on where they were two years ago – and many were looking desperately for strategies that offered even the faintest rays of hope.

Although the exact answer might vary from firm to firm, it seemed to me that the general principles were blindingly obvious.  There are two basic problems:  a) very few new customers are coming in through the door, and b) even when customers do come in, mortgage funds are so tight that it may not be possible to find a loan for them.  On the face of it, both these problems are eminently solvable.  As far as the lack of customers is concerned, most firms admit that they’re absolutely hopeless at maintaining and developing relationships with their existing customers, and almost equally hopeless at pro-actively going out and looking for new customers: they need to acquire both of these skills rather quickly.  And as far as the lack of mortgage funds is concerned, then the answer is that as well as mortgages it’s necessary to advise clients on a broader range of needs, either as well or instead.  (Fortunately, the mortgage stands right at the centre of clients’ financial and practical lives, connecting directly and immediately not only to a huge array of other financial products and services but also to a huge array of home-related issues:  most of those present were, I think, genuinely surprised when I suggested they might quite easily extend into utilities brokerage and advice.)

Sorted.  Obvious.  But we’re having a tough time at Tangible Financial too – being a marketing services firm specialising in the financial services industry is also a tough place to be at the moment.  So what are the equally obvious answers in our case? 

Trouble is, to me, the equally obvious answers look problematic and unappealing.  You might say, for example, that we should forget about financial clients and look for clients in other sectors who have more money to spend – sectors like maybe IT and pharmaceuticals, for example.  But we know nothing about IT or pharmaceuticals, and we have no contacts or networks in those worlds, while lots of our competitors know a great deal and own densely-packed address books:  it doesn’t sound like a winning move.  Or, there again, you migh say we should broaden the array of services we offer to the financial world.  Why don’t we do public relations?  Or event management?  Well, mainly because none of us knows anything about these things, and making a lot of expensive new hirings to plug the skills gaps feels awfully brave at the moment.  And, again, there are plenty of existing PR or event management companies who would no doubt defend their patches pretty fiercely against incomers.

Which isn’t to say that there’s nothing we can do to brighten our outlook – there are things, and we’re doing quite a few of them.  But the advice that might look obviously right to an outsider looks obviously very dodgy to me.

I could well be wrong.  Perhaps the advice is right, and I’m just being a silly old stick-in-the-mud.  But one thing’s for sure – my own dubiousness helps me understand the similarly dubious expressions on those mortgage brokers’ faces at the end of my talk on Monday.  �

Over the years I’ve come across quite a few products branded Vanguard, and they’ve all been a bit dodgy.

There was the UK aviation industry’s last mainstream propeller passenger plane, the Vickers Vanguard.  This was a bigger and roomier version of the highly-successful Vickers Viscount, but it was launched too late, in 1959, by which time the market had moved over almost entirely to jets.  Apart from the touchingly loyal local player, British European Airways, who bought 44 of them, Wikipedia says that the plane “was widely ignored” by the market.

At the same time, car-buyers were also doing a pretty good job of ignoring the Standard Vanguard, a medium-sized saloon car made by the Standard company from the late 40s to the early 60s.  During that time it went through several very different model variations, but two things they had in common were that a) they were all crap, and b) none of them sold well. Together with other equally dismal cars made by Standard during the same period, they wrote the death warrant of the company, which was subsumed into another now long-vanished brand, Triumph, in 1963.

Vanguard cigarettes were another flop.  Launched in the US right at the end of the 50s, they avoided all the health problems of tobacco by the simple expedient of including no tobacco.  This also meant they included none of the things people liked about cigarettes, like a) the tast of tobacco and b) the presence of nicotine. Later, around 1980, the Vanguard brand was launched in the UK.  I think I bought some.  I think they still didn’t contain tobacco, and were still disgusting.  They failed for a second time.

Vanguard Storage Services hasn’t failed, but it’s that slightly troubling self-storage place that you see when you drive out on Western Avenue which has a tower in the middle of the building on top of which the owner likes to put things like old RAF jets on their last stop before the scrapheap and models of London tourist attractions.   This is all very droll, but you do wonder a bit a) how many accidents are caused by rubbernecking motorists and b) whether this rather bizarre form of advertisement actually generates any self-storage business.

But things are about to change.  Unless I am very much mistaken, the UK market is about to see the launch of the first undodgy Vanguard.  The giant US retail investment house, famous for selling tracker funds at incredibly low prices, is widely rumoured to be gearing up for a launch that’ll represent the biggest US invasion since the run-up to D-Day.

To be honest, I think that if they play their cards right (which is, admittedly, a very big “if”), the silly, lazy, hopelessly fragmented UK industry will be sitting ducks.  I remember working 25 years ago on the launch of McDonald’s into the UK market:  it was said that when a senior team from McDonald’s in the US were taken on a fact-finding tour of the grim Wimpy Bars, Golden Eggs and Kardoma Coffee Houses that made up the UK fast-food industry of the time, they angrily demanded that their guides stopped showing them all the rubbish competition and took them to see the good places too.    The guides explained that this was, honestly and truthfully, as good as UK fast food providers got, and big smiles slowly spread across the Americans’ faces….

Assuming they’re able to avoid the stupid and sometimes disastrous mistakes that American corporations often make when they launch over here, it’ll be nice seeing an undodgy Vanguard for a change.  But I do rather fear for large chunks of the domestic competition, though.