Good morning and welcome to your Morning Briefing for Tuesday 14 November 2023. To get this in your inbox every morning click here.
Fintel snaps up VouchedFor
Fintel has announced the acquisition of financial adviser review site VouchedFor for £7.5m.
Fintel is the parent company of SimplyBiz and Defaqto. The acquisition will take place via its tech hub Fintel IQ.
Hidden benefits of advice
A US study by the Financial Planning Standards Board found improved financial wellbeing had a positive impact on health and family life by alleviating stress.
These benefits perhaps would surprise potential clients, though not advisers. But, asks Amanda Newman Smith, are there any other hidden benefits to financial advice we should all be shouting about?
Quote Of The Day
Now is the time to reflect on longer term policy strategy that would intergenerationally reconnect the UK’s immense store of pensions wealth, so it delivers pension promises, supports current workers and builds societal prosperity.
– Leonard Bowman, partner at Hymans Robertson, comments on his letter sent to the Work and Pensions Committee as part of its DB pensions inquiry
Stat Attack
In two months, the Hargreaves Lansdown Investor Confidence survey has dropped dramatically. HL suggestsed that, while the fall is stark, it is not surprising. Geo-political risk has increased significantly since September, with the unrest in Israel and Gaza impacting global stock market volatility, and grave concerns about escalation in the Middle East.
Source: Hargreaves Lansdown
In Other News
Aviva Investors has appointed Oskar Geldof as head of BeNeLux.
He is based in Amsterdam and reports to Torben Dunkel, head of Europe. In his new role, Geldof will be responsible for institutional business development activity across the BeNeLux countries.
He has over 20 years’ experience in the industry. He joins after a decade at Fidelity International where he was most recently head of institutional sales (public and private markets) for the Netherlands.
Prior to this, he held senior sales roles in asset management, and investment banking in London, New York and BeNeLux.
Geldof succeeds Catrinus Van Willigen, who has retired after almost 13 years with Aviva Investors.
ISS Market Intelligence, a unit of ISS STOXX and global provider of data, analytics, insights, media, and events solutions to the global financial services industry, has announced enhancements to its Simfund platform to deliver detailed fee and expense data for the Irish domiciled fund universe.
The comprehensive fee and expense intelligence covers over 100 unique data attributes, is captured at the share class level, and is updated annually and refreshed monthly.
Leveraging the powerful and customissable analytics capabilities offered by the Simfund platform, users will now be able to include in their analysis detailed fee breakdowns for Irish domiciled funds and can quickly and easily create custom peer group universes for benchmarking and comparative analysis, all in a single platform.
The addition of this dataset eliminates the need to integrate data from multiple sources, in turn allowing users more time to focus on extracting actionable insights from the data.
Cameron’s return revives memories of Greensill finance scandal (BBC News)
UK wage growth eases to 7.7% in third quarter (Financial Times)
India searches Aviva Life Insurance office for alleged tax evasion (Reuters)
Did You See?
Recent speeches and discussion papers have set out the Financial Conduct Authority’s plans to use the existing regulatory regime to regulate the use of tech in financial services, says solicitor Alastair Nuttall.
It is focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) because the financial services sector is investing heavily in it. AI has the potential to cause harm to consumers of financial services if not deployed responsibly.
At a firm level, use could harness AI’s predictive capabilities to make or inform decisions that impact clients.
