Building something that lasts...

It has long been our contention that much of our financial services industry in the UK is simply unsustainable.  Even as I pen this article, it is evident that many of our main competitors are only able to continue in business because they depend upon sources of revenues that, post December 31st 2012, will no longer be available to them.  The marketplace, in terms of product-charges and the kinds of commissions which used to be enjoyed, has already changed forever, and the dinosaurs of the financial intermediation world are simply delaying the inevitable.

That being self-evidently the case, and having made the assumption that it is better for small and medium-sized intermediary firms to work together, rather than experience the joys of FSA regulation on their own, we've worked very hard indeed to build the ideal network for financial-planning and wealth-management firms which have already signed up to an RDR-based culture and methodology, and which wish to remain utterly independent in terms of their advice proposition.  The signs are that relatively few of our competitors will be offering this kind of model, post 2012.

At ValidPath, we've always been focused on a sustainable business model, which in practice means features such as:

• explicable, transparent costs
• minimal or no cross-subsidies
• hard work on risk-management
• a fully-independent advice proposition (no ifs, no buts)
• future-proof systems
• investment in Members' practice-development
• 100% client-oriented solutions
• working collaboratively together (sharing resources, ideas, services)

We have a brand new leaflet, entitled 'A decent proposition'.  You can download it by clicking here.