We tweeted last week about the launch event of Allmyplans.com – a new venture begat from the creators of Webline and Quay (amongst others).

The new service is attempting to do something that is actually quite tricky for the financial services space – be interesting and relevant to a growing population of tech-savvy, time poor consumers – consumers who use google, Facebook, MySpace and other internet enabled tools daily.

When I was working at The Exchange on Exweb it was around the time moneyextra.com was created – a classic B2C infomediary service, with comparison engines, links to providers and manufacturers and about 8 years too early. It wasn’t that moneyextra.com didn’t cut the mustard, it was that it struggled to be relevant and didn’t engage the consumer well enough and the impact of the internet of consumer behaviour was still low. After a relatively short period of time, moneyextra.com changed hands, became a conduit advice service for the Bank of Ireland and its UK subsidiaries, changed hands a couple more times and is now an authorised IFA owned by a number of private investors. Over the last five years, there’s been an explosion of comparative sites, gocompare, moneysupermaket et al all of whom have made great in roads to providing routes to market for, mainly, commodity products with personal lines business being at the top of the tree.

What has been missing in these propositions is a compelling digital offering that engages consumers for more complex financial planning needs and routes through to advice. There are a number of solution vendors who are trying to make the grade and the sort of innovation being developed is really quite head turning.

Take 1st – The Exchange – they have recently launched Advice Navigator (AdNav) – they recognised that a better route to consumer engagement was a slick, relevant and informative user interface that wasn’t constrained by static website builds – so using some cutting-edge technologies, mainly Microsoft’s SilverLight, they have developed a platform that delivers some very attractive results – now, link that with all the heritage of the transactional services delivered to their traditional B2B service, Exweb, you really start to motor. So, as a provider, you are able to produce a visually attractive proposition, capture client information subtly during the screen interaction and then draw the consumer through a compliant selection and fulfilment process – nice and straight-through.

Now if you extend that approach to create a platform that can be tailored for an individual IFA’s needs, present a robust consumer-facing web presence coupled with a industrial strength back office, you can start to change the way the consumer accesses products and services. One of the smart things that the Allmyplans team has decided on is to allow access to a vast array of product provider central systems without dictating any particular approach or technology. Despite there being standards for this type of activity, Allmyplans are clever enough to realise that the variations are huge and that the pragmatic approach is take anything the provider throws at them, including paper.

What is clear is that consumers are becoming increasingly reliant on internet delivered services for other parts of their lives, but interaction with financial practioners is still trapped in late-sixties technology approaches – and that has to change, as the risks of new approaches, like goole’s recent announcement of the extension of google finance, might well overtake traditional advice models. What’s interesting too, is that google don’t appear to have the inhibitors that Microsoft have (had) with regard to providing value-added services in their own right – we mentioned a few weeks ago Microsoft Money – it never really worked, but mainly because it didn’t go far enough (and it was tortuous!).

With the new offerings hitting the market now, either for direct to consumer propositions for the larger institutions, or enabling platforms for fleet of foot distributor firms it’s going to be interesting times to see if they can capture the consumers’ heart and minds.

It is an interesting dilemma as I consider whether I should feel inclined to defend the FSA! Today, the FSA announced its annual business plan for 2010/11 and they have made some controversial (confrontational?) statements…

The plan shows an increased budget expenditure of 18.3% to £491m. Staff costs have increased by 16% as the regulator is recruiting 460 additional personnel to increase its supervisory activity – as Hector Sants has said, ‘a more intrusive regulator is going to cost more’. We should not forget that the regulator is responsible for more than just the Life and Pensions sector to which much of our core readership belong. Indeed, with the recommendations of the Turner Report, Solvency II, Basel enhancements, a more EU-centric regulatory influence and not forgetting our favourite subject of RDR, it is clear that there are many ‘spinning plates’ to handle. Added to this we also have the FSA talking recently about its intention to focus on what sort of ‘Product regulation’ it should apply (looking at Provider business models, product design, purpose, marketing and stress testing).

Reading the comments to articles in much of the financial press – mainly from IFAs – and it is clear that there is a strongly cynical attitude towards the FSA and its record on regulation. UK plc has often boasted in the past about the success of its ‘light touch’ regulatory regime applied to the wider Financial Services market. Many – perhaps with the benefit of hindsight – have questioned our dependence on the sector and its true value to the wider economy. As with the mis-selling scandals of the past (pensions, endowments and PPI), we seem to apply ‘acquired wisdom’ to how and why the warning signs were all too often dismissed or ignored – something that is evident in the latest crisis and will, no doubt, be repeated again in the future (crisis and calm cycles are as real as boom and bust).

The FSA (prompted by public opinion, political direction and a degree of self-justification) is now talking tough about what it is going to do. The pendulum of ‘light touch’ has swung to ‘intrusive and controversial’… Some of the commentators are crying foul about the tough stance being applied ‘evenly’ towards an IFA sector that has a good track record of behaviour. They have quoted comparative statistics that show the number of complaints against IFAs is relatively small [smaller] than the Banking sector. I recall a phrase from my past, that ‘there is nothing as unequal as treating people as equal’. I agree, and it is one of the difficulties that regulators face when applying standards and supervision that seems to focus on the lowest common denominator. The IFA community does feel that it is disparaged by the behaviour of other sectors – usually claimed to be Banks/Bancassurers – that rubs off on their reputation and the decline on public confidence.

Herein lies the rub, standards should be consistent and customers should expect the regulator to set high expectations of the industry and ensure – through supervision – that all parties are meeting these expectations. When the respective parties – providers, IFAs, tied advisers, Bancassurers etc – comment about each other, they often claim that they are not the problem, it is someone else! My experience is that not all IFAs are good and not all Bancassurers are bad. The regulator applied a ‘light touch’ and was criticised for doing so, now the regulator is saying that they will be more prescriptive, look at a wider scope and will be more interrogative (potentially combative). The industry is unhappy… It sounds like the regulator is ‘damned if they do and damned if they don’t’.

Depending on the risk of activities and the application of ethics by companies and individuals (not just a statement of what they are by the regulator), we should be able to adjust the regulatory burden. However, with the track record that we have seen over many years, we are not currently in a strong position to argue against the need for greater regulatory control in some, if not all aspects of Financial Services. Sadly, it is the actions of certain parties that spoil it for everyone. Often, it is the lack of a ‘moral compass’ and/or a Gordon Geko belief that ‘greed is good’ that undermines the standards that many operate as part of ‘business as usual’. The ‘police’ – the regulator – can only do so much. The ‘society’ of Financial Services (all parties) need to take greater responsibility for how it behaves collectively, but to do so in a constructive way. Blame and counter-blame has not worked well so far. ‘Perception is truth’ and the truth is that the industry is not perceived as well as it should be. We all have our part to play – let’s do so fairly and positively.

We have just finished our round of case studies of the use of technology in the adviser world. From the fifteen adviser firms we interviewed we would draw the following conclusions:

* The top distributors have woken up to the benefits in technology and are investing heavily to support their businesses
* The networks are moving to a model of part mandatory use of technology (usually around the submission of business)
* The networks are aligning themselves with particular IT vendors – IntelliFlo, Focus, Distribution Technology and 1st – The Exchange are winning these battles
* The Smaller distributors use a wide variety of technologies and are gaining real business benefits: IntelliFlo and 1st – The Exchange are doing well in this sector, as are Plum and Bluecoat Software
* Product and Fund research tools are also gaining a strong presence with Morningstar, Synaptic, OBSR and Defaqto being most frequently cited
* FinQS’s TCF centre is gain traction in supporting both the smaller IFAs and the networks

During the case studies we covered many different business models and lots of different uses of IT. It has become clear that despite the predictions of doom after 2012, parts of the distributor market are resilient and many are now preparing and will be ready for RDR. Our interviews were however with the leaders in the industry and we are well aware of the horror stories about how many distributors aren’t doing the necessary preparation for RDR. Indeed a recent moneysupermarket.com survey claimed 18% of IFAs were waiting until 2012 to start changing to become RDR compliant.

Hopefully our articles will encourage some of these to change their mind and use technology to re-engineer their business now, so they can start reaping the benefits now and not wait for 2012.