Advice is a valuable service

When Investment Week was launched on 30 January 1995, the industry was less than a decade into its life under the Financial Services Act and many advisers and product providers were getting used to the brave new world of polarisation.

So then, just as now, much of the industry debate is about the regulatory status of the distributors – financial advisers in their numerous guises. What was apparent to us, and the reason we established Investment Week, was not enough attention was being paid to the fundamental component of many financial services products – the investment. We argued back in 1995 that a pension was merely an investment with a complex and attractive tax wrapper. Many investors and advisers had begun to realise Peps were exactly the same, if not much simpler to understand and there were other versions –...