Standard Life goes for the holy grail

If comments appear this thread from IFAs casting doubt on this initiative then SL are definitely on to a winner!

Dreckly, some IFAs are actually client based and not sales based, this does therefore not affect the new school and if this wrapper is any good and is of an actual benefit to the more investment astute client than I will happily say, 'hi Mr client, use this for keeping a tab of your personal investments as it is in your interest to do so'

However, if Standard Life, the masters of moving goalposts halfway through a game (remember the bid offer spread they tried to put on their deposit fund), use marketing to lure the public in droves to the system whilst accepting no responsibility for what happens next, plus only offering thought charts for guidance (which are flawed) then this could be a potential headache.

All tools are useful if they are used appropriately... I neither praise nor condemn this system as of yet.

Ah, Nish: he's not the messiah, ad absurdum. I can't comment on him being a naughty boy. "Standard doing the same as every other provider" might have been a more fitting headline, to my eyes.

Agreed Mr Ed. Is this not what Cofunds, Fundsnetwork, Hargreaves and the rest already offer? For me a better headline might have been "Standard Life playing catch up in investment platform market"...

Ed & David, you are right, how different can one open architect wrapper really be to another? Its like a new watch, shinier than the old, but the primary function remains.

If it's SL's intention to offer direct online investments, surely this is only a regulated process (they hope). The underlying question must always be the quality of the advise as well as the proposed investments. Who says that SL are any better at picking the right investment than the next man??

Anyone who has had experience of their wrap proposition must seriously doubt their ability to deliver on this. We have had to check and double check everything we held on their. There have been countless errors and as for expecting a clinet to use it - it's the most complicated of all the wraps/platforms around. Of course I may be proved wrong................................

Surely this will make financial services more accessible to more people after the FSA's rules will effectively price many low and middle income people out of the market.

Delivering a system is one thing, however delivering investment advice is another and you can't help feeling a lot of people who see their funds growing and think they are doing a good job, could have their fingers and limbs seriously burned if they are picking their own funds etc.

It seems obvious to me that the only valid scheme would be for someone to set up a multi-fund vehicle which automatically adjusted to only include upper quartile performers in each sector. The investor would then only have to use his judgement re balancing of his funds by sector. I am well aware that IFA's say that it's impossible to select funds in this way, but I think that's just laziness--if a particular fund with the same fund manager has been upper quartile for 5 years, whilst other funds have been all over the place, then surely that's where one's money is safest.