I’ve been on holiday in Manhattan for the last 5 days doing the usual touristy things with the wife and kids. Its been great fun, but it won’t come as any surprise to those of you who know me that I haven’t been able to entirely switch my brain away from work. So, here’s a post that combines a holiday experience with the stuff that pays the bills…
The picture above was taken on Times Square, and features a huge advert by Marsh, the self-styled world’s leading insurance broker. The copy contains such gems as ‘Risk and you shall receive’, ‘Where there’s a risk there’s a way’, ‘Risk makes the world go round’ and my personal favourite, ‘When you risk upon a star’!
Apart from being mildly amusing, what immediately struck me was that, not only had Marsh pitched at the high street (and possibly the world’s most famous one at that), but they’d picked investment risk as a subject! Personally, I’m far more attracted to this as subject matter than anything that Gartmore, Jupiter et all have stuffed through my letterbox via those annoying wraparounds that accompany the pinks each week. Risk is practically a dirty word in UK financial services marketing, yet across the pond they see it as an opportunity; food for thought.
It’s not just Marsh who are taking a turn on the high street, though: directly opposite their hoardings is a building clad in giant TV screens pumping out a commercial for Lehman Brothers Wealth Management Services, and around the corner is an ING internet cafe, (looking conspicuously like one of Stelios’s hideously orange easyinternet cast-offs), with a window strapline of ’sit, surf and save’! In fact, from Midtown to Wall Street, it seems that every block has either a prominent ad or a shopfront for a major retail financial services distributor (Fidelity, Schwab, E*trade).
Further uptown, however, the ads are replaced by recently-polished gold plates and imposing solid doors fronting the discreet offices of multi-million dollar LLCs that have grown out of family practices managing the old money. I doubt whether these guys are troubled much by the subtle nuances of commission (hard, soft, indemnity, initial, trail), fees, retainers or factory gate pricing.
Perhaps, as a result of the segmentation of retail distribution which I personally feel is the inevitable conclusion of the FSA’s Retail Distribution Review, this is how our high streets might look in a few years time…
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