Good morning and welcome to your Morning Briefing for Monday 29 November, 2021. To get this in your inbox every morning click here.
Data connection
US wealth manager Raymond James has become the first firm to partner with a new data integration hub.
The hub called FINIO aims to simplify the integration process between investment platforms and adviser software providers.
It is designed by Sprint Enterprise Technology that was founded in 2010 and is known for Fastrak software.
This enables advisers and wealth managers to review and report on client investments.
AJ Bell makes investing a Dodl
AJ Bell has announced it will launch a new, app-only investment platform which aims to make investing more straightforward and accessible for retail investors.
The new service will be called Dodl by AJ Bell.
It will compete with the lowest-cost investment platforms in the market, with an annual charge of 0.15% and no commission for buying or selling investments.
Time for change
With crucial issues such as climate change and a growing advice gap, what has to be done now to rectify problems before they worsen?
Kim North, managing director at Technology & Technical, write for Money Marketing.
Quote Of The Day
Fear has gripped the financial markets with the travel industry flying into another violent storm.
– Hargreaves Lansdown senior investment and markets analyst Susannah Streeter after the stock markets across the world fell sharply after the discovery of a new Covid variant in states in Southern Africa
Stat Attack
A third of UK adults have continued to work while feeling unwell in the past 18 months, according to research from Canada Life. It highlights the significant impact the Covid pandemic is continuing to have on our working lives and habits.
35%
Of UK adults have continued to work while feeling unwell in the past 18 months
22%
Of those working from home having reported working longer hours
20%
Of those working from home found their working day to be more stressful than before
21%
A fifth of respondents who admitted to working while unwell, said that they would have taken the time off if lockdown restrictions hadn’t applied.
24%
Said they were worried about the financial implications of taking time off
32%
felt a greater pressure to ‘be present’ at work – although this has dropped from 46% during the peak of the pandemic in 2020
Source: Canada Life
In Other News
Brown Shipley has appointed Georgina Breeze as a client advisor for Manchester.
She will report to Martin Cuthbert – head of Brown Shipley’s Manchester office.
Breeze brings 13 years of experience, joining from Barclays Wealth and Investment Management, where she spent the past 10 years looking after high-net-worth and entrepreneur clients, providing investment advice on discretionary and advisory portfolios.
Prior to her time at Barclays Wealth Breeze started her career in financial services at St James’s Place, where she joined as a business development manager. She was later appointed as a financial adviser, responsible for attracting new clients and looking after their investment and financial planning needs.
She also holds a voluntary position as a school governor.
A Gambian ambassador has been ordered to pay more than £80,000 after being found guilty of withholding information from The Pensions Regulator (TPR).
Vincent Bootes was tried in his absence at Brighton Magistrates’ Court on Friday (26 November) in a prosecution brought by TPR over allegations he failed to comply with two notices issued under section 72 of the Pensions Act 2004.
The 58-year-old, who had previously entered a not guilty plea, claimed he could not attend court as he was considered persona non grata in the UK.
Bootes had also renounced his British citizenship to take a position as an ambassador for The Republic of Gambia in West Africa.
The two notices had been issued as part of a TPR investigation into whistleblowers’ allegations that staff working for him at PGT Ceewrite Engineering, had not had automatic enrolment workplace pension contributions paid by his companies, despite the cash being deducted from their pay-packets.
As a result of the introduction of Pension Freedoms in 2015, pension savers no longer have to convert their pension pot at retirement to an annuity – an income for life.
Since these changes were implemented, annuity sales have slumped and the majority of new retirees either cash out their pension pot in full or move it into a drawdown account to support them through retirement.
However, new research from consultants LCP has found that many pensioners should be revisiting that decision later in retirement and could get better outcomes by switching some or all of their savings into an annuity.
The new paper – Is there a right time to buy annuity – is based on a model which compares the happiness a retiree would get at each point in retirement from staying in drawdown compared with switching to an annuity.
The model looks at potential outcomes over a range of more than 2,000 different scenarios for future investment performance and life expectancy.
The model takes account of factors such as attitude to risk (allowing for the fact that people generally have loss aversion and feel much more dissatisfaction from losing money than they get satisfaction from gaining an equivalent amount) and any desire to have funds at the end to pass on to heirs.
New research from life insurance experts I’m Insured has revealed that more than one in three ‘fin-fluencers’ are providing bad life insurance advice to their large followings.
The business took to TikTok to analyse 70 videos and hours of financial content to measure the accuracy of the claims and the findings showed that over a third of videos contained ill-informed advice.
I’m Insured experts uncovered that the majority of life insurance content on TikTok was for American policies. A problem for UK users looking for insurance-related content, as there is a big difference in our insurance systems.
The research reviewed both the accuracy of the advice provided and how it corresponds with the UK’s insurance regulations and policies, to reveal the dangers faced to TikTok users consuming the life insurance advice provided from fin-fluencers.
Oil and gas and mining companies have raised £1.1bn in new equity in the past year – up 307% from the £270m raised the previous year, according to research from UHY Hacker Young.
The fourfold increase comes as commodity prices boom. Oil and gas prices have hit multi-year highs, while metal prices have also rebounded strongly from their Covid lows.
The unexpectedly strong economic recovery post-pandemic has fuelled demand for commodities.
With the bounce back in prices, oil and gas and mining companies have been looking to raise money as they rush to bring previously mothballed projects back online.
Some have required an injection of new capital from investors to do this.
From Elsewhere
Australia banking watchdog publishes long-awaited capital rules (Reuters)
Almost 400,000 on social care lists amid ‘rapidly deteriorating’ situation (Evening Standard)
Sunak urged to cut taxes as virus fears drain confidence (The Telegraph)
Stock markets stage recovery despite ominous omicron implications for global COVID fightback (Sky News)
Did You See?
I’ve been having a mare with one pension provider (which I won’t name), which is pretty much blocking a transfer. Am I alone in not having physical copies of utility bills to send as ID and proof of address? Surely there are quicker and easier ways to verify my identity than sending docs via post?
I even had to take a scanned copy of my driver’s licence to the Post Office to pay to get a verification stamp. What is this, the 90s?
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