The Professional Adviser Awards took place last night and I was kept up to date with events by Dennis Hall via Twitter (thanks Dennis). I have a slight reservation with this type of awards ceremony mainly due to the fact that the winners are declared based on a vote. It could be said that this is a popularity contest and not an objective test of quality although I would like to think that a vote would only be cast based on the quality of the recipient but you never know.
We were nominated for a similar award once and the clarification of the nomination came with a table booking form for the awards dinner at a cost of £2,500 – we didn’t go and didn’t win either. My reservation about such events is that they are there to make money and produce marketing and PR content and not to produce an objective assessment of the nominees. Compare this to events such as Financial Planner of the Year or Paraplanner of the Year both of which involve a rigorous assessment of the entries and not a popular vote.
Anyway, the main reason for this post is to comment on Skandia as the winner of the Best Wrap Platform. Now Skandia does what it does very well in the main but it is a fund supermarket and not a wrap platform. It does not have:
- Access to the whole market
- A true customer agreed remuneration facility
- Transparent charging with no kick backs from fund managers
These are all things which, in my opnion, must be present to make a wrap account.
Skandia has been very cute with their marketing to position themselves as a ‘wrap’ and they do have a very good online proposition (better than some wraps). BUT, it is not a wrap account. I could understand if Skandia was voted best pension or investment provider.
I am not questioning that a lot of people think Skandia is a good product provider (I would not disagree with them) but that it was placed in the wrap category in the first place.
One really good thing to come from last night was Svenja Keller winning her second Paraplanner of the Year Award. You can read her submissions from her first award here (bit more work needed to win this one).
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I think you sum up what a joke these awards are, unfortunately it continues to show that we have an industry of salesmen and sales managers and old gits or clueless white socked monkeys who are clueless. Skandia for best wrap …seriously why not just show an episode of the muppets rather than have an awards ceremony its no different ?