From Embark to Scottish Widows: Decoding Lloyds’ decision to rebrand

Transcript

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

So hello, everyone. Welcome to compare the platforms cut through the Noise podcast, bringing new content that matters to you, the advisor. This week’s press was full of the news that Embark is launching the Scottish Widows platform. So I’m excited to say that with me in the studio is Jackie Leiper, CEO of the Embark group. And MD of pensions, stockbroking and distribution at Lloyds Bank. Hello, Jackie and thank you very much for taking the time to join me in the studio as we have loads to talk about.

Jackie Leiper

Morning, Bella. I’m delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

It’s always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. So, Jackie, I’m always really interested in the personal angle and the shape and direction of people’s careers. So you’ve been at Lloyds Bank since 2010, I believe. But you started your career at Scottish Amicable and Prudential running customer services operations. And so you’ve come a long way since then, but tell me about those early days, please.

Jackie Leiper

Thank you, Bella. I’ll let me cast my mind back. So you’re right. I started my career at Scottish Amicable, and I joined in the very, very bottom. I was in customer service in the corporate pensions team, and it was a fantastic place to join and sort of learn your trade. I mean I didn’t, you know, mean to come into pensions, or investments or insurance, but Scottish Amicable at that time used to recruit around all of the universities and schools, so there’s about 200 of us joined the same summer as me and it was just a fantastic grounding in terms of the training, the development, the social life. And my very first job was really the sort of office run about, you know, filing these in the days before you had computers, they weren’t even computers on desks. There were some terminals. And there were phones. And most of the administration was all done on paper. So it was. You know, quite a stretch away from where we are now where everything, so everything’s at your fingertips. So I did various different roles. One of the things when you go into a sort of larger company. Amicable was a reasonably large company at that time. Before it was bought by Prudential as you had the chance to move about, so I did lots of different roles where I worked with sales actually. And a lot of my roles were advisor facing even back then and then laterally, as you say before I left, I ran the contacts centre. Which was 1000 people across four different sites covering all of the products that Scottish Amicable and Prudential manufactured distributed over the years, and we had that, that contact saying to split between advisers and end customers. And it was one of the most favourite times of my career, I have to say.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Wow, that’s incredible. So 1000 people, I mean. And the reason I’m asking about customer service and where you’ve cut your teeth essentially is because this is really, really important to advisers, right, you know, and the biggest complaint I hear from advice is, you know, the poor customer service they get from all the platforms. So you know you’re bringing that skill set to the new platform, which is incredible and that, you know, that’s. Really, sort of. What I wanted to pull out. What would you say? You know, you’ve learned about customer service that. You know. I suppose the question is really about, you know. How do you go about making sure that advisors get a great service and you know from you in terms of the contact with Scottish Widows?

Jackie Leiper

So I think service is absolutely the heart because it’s a people business essentially. You know, advisors are looking after their clients, they’re passionate about their clients, they have very personal relationships with their clients and therefore they want to be able to deal with their platform providers efficiently. But when they need help or if something goes wrong. They want to know that they can speak to someone, someone that they trust. And I’m quite obsessed about things like some of the processes we have in the background. You know what, what? What happens when you know someone submits a request to do a transfer, for example, you know, how do you do that really efficiently? How do you recognise that there are bits of that process because of the nature of it. Whereas, you know, cross various organisations you’re dealing with their party providers. There’s, you know, there’s various different steps. It’s just the nature of that particular process. You know, how do you make sure that you’re that you’re thinking through it every step, how you can keep people updated, how you can remove some of the blockers? How? You can just make that as smooth and simple as possible.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira
Yeah.

Jackie Leiper
You know, if you’re speaking to my teams, I am quite hands on in this area. So I spent a lot of time in the Dundee operation with the teams there, going through some of the processes. We’ve got it all mapped up. On the wall, you know, where are we seeing areas that we could improve, you know we have we see buildups in volumes and

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Whereas the friction kind of thing, yeah. Yeah. Now you take the friction out.

Jackie Leiper
Exactly. exactly. And how do you get it out, how do you get?

Jackie Leiper
And how? Do you then, sort of, team that with sort of proactive listening to advisers, cause almost in the operation, you’re getting the sort of live experience. It is still reasonably reactive. Something’s already happened. You know the other part of this is how do you make sure your relationship teams at the front end are able to sort of harness the best of ideas from advisors. So we’ve been running and launched at the start of this year sort of advisor listening forums where we. In all the different local areas. So literally going round all the sort of. Towns and centres where we have large groups of advisors inviting them and getting them to talk about what’s important to them, get them to feedback on our specific propositions and systems, but also talking through you know where they need us to be focused next so that we’ve got one eye on our sort of road maps and development.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yeah. No, that’s incredible. That’s really, that’s really interesting because you’re right, when an adviser calls, generally it’s because there’s an issue, right? So if they call up, you know, understanding why they’re calling and trying to take the friction out of that process is really important. But equally, you also want to hear from them and get their feedback on how to improve. I mean, Jackie, some people would say that Lloyd’s moves at a glacial pace. It took the bank almost 2 decades to decide to buy a platform and with interest rates on the rise now, right? Yeah. And with interest rates on the on the rise now other parts of Lloyds are likely to be bigger revenue generators, in the short to medium term right, or at least until you build a sufficient scale. So given the high cost, the thin margins and the sheer hard work of running a platform, you just gave us a little bit of an idea around the processes and how you communicate. Why did Lloyds buy Embark and why have you now converted it to Scottish Widows?

Jackie Leiper

So there were probably several reasons why Lloyd bought Embark, so the ambition was always to be able to have an investment platform. And actually the initial work to acquire Embark was really all about the Scottish Widows business and for the intermediary business, so Scottish Widows for me is really, our intermediary business, you know we’ve got our big workplace pensions business, we do protection, we do annuities. But we didn’t have an investment platform. We had a retirement account. And retirement account is successful as a very sort of stand alone and packaged product. But you know, advisors have been very clear that they wanted the full benefit of an investment platform, so they can use all of the product wrappers for their customers. So I think given we were late to the party and two decades makes it sound glacially late, but late to the party. Getting into the investment platform, yeah, acquisition was the best way and Embark, you know, brought not just an existing platform with customers on it. The really important thing that we wanted to acquire was the agility of the change team and they almost like my jewel in the Crown, I have to say the change team that we acquired and Embark are pretty unique, you know they know the FNZ platform, which is their technology provider, inside out. They’re able to do development on that platform. They work really closely with the teams at FNZ and actually bring a lot of solution design expertise which really helps us. You know I think move much more quickly and more rapidly to solve issues when we’re trying to sort of develop new propositions on the platform. So they’ve been pretty instrumental in what we’ve managed to achieve so far this year, but also for the road map. That we’ve got. Now the second part. Actually was to create propositions for the bank franchise customers and it’s interesting because I’ve been having, you know, we’ve got sort of new people that have joined. I’ve got a new group, chief exec for Scottish Widows. And actually. They we’ve done such a good job internally talking about some of the new propositions that we’re launching. So we’ve just looked ready, made investments earlier this year. We’ve got the SIPP products coming.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yeah, I saw. Yeah, I saw the billboards. It’s great, yes.

Jackie Leiper

So the first time we’ve gone massive on something. From the sort of pensions and investment side, through the bank brands, so this is this is quite new for the group to do. Something like this. Where it’s really joined up and we’ve built this product on the Embark platform already made investments, but it’s fully integrated into the bank’s digital gateway, so. If you were. It’s aimed at existing bank customers. If you’re on Internet banking, then it is you know, you open your investment account from the Internet banking layer. It’s that’s how you manage the account.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

And that’s brilliant. And Jackie, is that is that is that just one sign on so they sign into their bank account.

Jackie Leiper

Yes.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

And there’s just one sign on. And they can go in and look at the ready made, that’s a really, really great way of engaging consumers. So that’s great.

Jackie Leiper

Very different actually. Very much, yeah. And actually, to be honest, the technical build was pretty tricky, you know, so you can imagine the. Banking Internet gateways, a bit like Fort Knox, but now that we’ve built it and we’ve got everything, we’ve got everything all developed and we’ll be able to use all the data. So the other thing we wanted to do for that product was make sure that customers didn’t have to give us information we already have on them, so it’s all literally, you know. Prepopulated. It uses everything. You can open one of those products and less than two minutes.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

That’s amazing. You know, that’s I mean, I mean it’s fair to say, I mean I, you know. I did say that you Lloyds had moved the glacial pace but since the since making the decision to acquire you’ve definitely moved exceptionally fast. I mean I know you had a budget of around 150 million to develop and grow the proposition across. The business, but this, that’s no easy challenge. I mean it, as you say, it’s a multi channel proposition. Operating across D2C, a workplace, banking, advice, and across the different brands, right. So I’m assuming that Scottish Widows is the brand for advisors, is it called Lloyds when people go into the ready made investments or is it also Scottish Widows?

Jackie Leiper

No. So, what we’ve done is in this sort of strategy we’ve got is Scottish Widows will be the advisor brand. You’re absolutely right. We did quite a lot of research actually just to validate that was the right thing to do and advisers there’s really wholeheartedly supported that as the lead brand is a brand their customers are aware of and know about. So that’s the decision there. On the, on the bank side, we actually use what we call brand above the door. So ready made investments is branded in Bank of Scotland and Halifax and in Lloyds. So it’s all based on whatever brand that customers in now, interestingly. We are the. One of the debates we’re having and where. We’re likely to go as Scottish Widows will be our non-bank brand for direct consumer too so that we haven’t launched that yet. But you know if we have external customers that want to come in and, you know, use the D2C proposition if you like, but they’re not banking through any of those brands they would default to Scottish Widows.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yes. Then that would be well, it makes sense because yeah, that certainly makes sense because you know everybody recognises that brand. But yes, so you’re doing a huge amount of work. Is there enough money in the Kitty to fund everything to fund your ambitions? Cause I’m imagining that, you know, you obviously want to take a leading role in the investment.

Jackie Leiper

So this was a multi year programme for us, so at the moment I’m still motoring ahead as fast as I can because I think pace and actually getting some proof points back for both, you know, the group so that you know, into my stakeholders internally to show what we. Can do. And how quickly we can develop has been really important. So I’m glad to say I’ve had tremendous support internally both from the board and from the sort of group exec team around the speed that we’ve been able to develop this. And actually you can imagine everyone’s got an opinion on the journey and the adverts and all the rest of it. So at the moment I’m not, that’s not something but you know, we can’t take our foot off the gas. So we have got an incredibly challenged programme over the rest of this year both on continuing to develop out the advisor proposition. We’ve got more direct to consumer propositions and we’ve also really been starting to develop the white label proposition, which will stay under the Embark brand. Actually that will be our technology brand.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

That’s a really interesting point. So it just we’ll unpick those separately, but let’s start with the advisor proposition. Jackie, you’ve mentioned the retirement account, which is very popular. Do you plan to bring some of those off platform products onto the platform because that would really make sense, wouldn’t if you could join up all the pieces for the advisor, that would help you sell like hot cakes, I would imagine.

Jackie Leiper

Yes, that is absolutely the ambition. So we, we’ve done this sort of rebrand and did quite a big sort of implementation earlier this year. And then again just last month ahead of this launch of the Scottish Windows platform. And then we’ve got some new investment solutions that will come on later this year. Then we will build on the retirement account features as well. So you’re absolutely right, this has got to be the one place that advisers go and I’ve got an ambition to look beyond that because we do annuities as well. You know, could I find a way of getting that one to platform, would that give advisors the ability to manage everything from one place, so that’s in our thinking. How do we really create this sort of advisory ecosystem bringing all the things that we have available to make it really easy.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Together in one place, yeah.

Jackie Leiper

Together in one place. Because at the heart of my whole solution here is. How do I make this super simple for advisors? How do I make this really integrated and how they’re on their businesses? The systems that they use already, you know, how do we bring all of the advisor tools that they love? So some of the other things in the market, so that’s been a big part of what we’ve been doing early this year, really sort of integrating into those tools and bringing them into the advisor portal. And then the second part of this and this. Is quite this is really important for me personally, it goes back to this sort of customer service mantra where we will want to be the most loved platform where advisers feel they get lots of human support, so you know. I’m probably going the opposite way from everyone else, where I am significantly investing and increasing my customer service team. And my front line sort of relationship teams so that we are love bombing our advisors and that they will get all the support that they need to. But and I think it’s you know it’s a human business right. So I recognise there’s lots of platforms out there and If I want them to love my platform, it’s got to be easy, but we’ve got to make it. Easy, you know? Help them. You know, get used to us if they’re using us for the first time, help them get their clients across from wherever they are at the moment.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yeah, I mean it look it’s you know platforms, a lot of the platforms do similar things and the and you have to differentiate your platform through the user experience. And I think that’s either going to be you know obviously the user interface, what it looks like, how easy it is to navigate, but also how easy it is, how easy it is to call because. There’s no doubt that you know, an advisor is only going to ring you when he’s got an issue, right? How do I do this? How do I do that? Where’s my where’s my pension transfer? My client has sadly passed away. What do we need to do? Those are the kind of tricky things, so you’re and you’re right. And the fact that you are, you know, a big platform with a huge parent company means that you’ve got the muscle to provide that kind of support. And it’s not easy to run a platform. So yeah.

Jackie Leiper

But you know, I think if you go right back to sort of first principles around if this was my business, you know and my clients, what would I want and it’s all fairly straightforward stuff, isn’t it, you know, make it easy, make sure I only input information once. Like when I need information quickly I need to run a client report. I’m going to a meeting, you know make sure I can do that really sort of efficiently and accurately. And actually when. I’m doing something that’s quite sensitive to your point of bereavement or particularly when people are moving money from one platform to another, advisors. To get quite worried about that you. Know. So let’s. Make sure that all of that is, really slick, really easy, and they can see what’s happening at all stages.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Exactly. I mean, I suppose sometimes they just want to check in. Right. Who’s is everything on, you know, and you. You almost need to build that into the process. Where you know? Every week or so, you sort of e-mail them. Say it’s all still going smoothly. Don’t worry so that they. Don’t. They don’t. Really.

Jackie Leiper

Exactly. They don’t. So they don’t think it’s. Radio silence, you. Know what’s happening?

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

They’re exactly right. Exactly right. It’s little things like that. So I mean it’s, you know, so it’s a really it’s. A really sort of interesting angle that. The whole, you know, advisers that you’re going for, you know, building up that that presence among the advised community. So I wanted to ask you about the sort of large regional and national advice firms who many of them are thinking about, you know, their own white label solutions and you’ve you touched. You know, a little while earlier on the whole white labelled proposition, is that something that you’re still going to be pushing and are you going to be competing then with the likes of SS&C Hubwise or SEQL and Fundament because I know you already have one. So I wanted to understand a bit more about your future ambition on that front.

Jackie Leiper

Yeah. So in a nutshell, yes, we see that as a really exciting part of the market. And actually, you know consolidation is you know are happening at pace amongst advisers. We can all see it. And I think white label offers a really neat solution for advisor firms that want to have much more control over their client experience, and that’s what we see. You know, these larger firms want to be able to take more control and input to the design of the customer experience. And a white label solution can offer almost that sort of happy place of you. You’re not trying to run a platform and all the technology elements that go with that, you’re not trying to run it from a compliance perspective. All the CASS, all the sort of risk that sits in there and actually quite frankly, the cost of running a platform. I mean, you made the comment. Running a platform is not easy, but a white label can give you all the benefits and upside around the client journeys that you want to have. If you are trying to get efficiencies in your own firm and you want to have standard processes and you want to have all your favourite products and investment solutions, you can have all of that. You can, you know, take a share in the commercial side of things as well. So it can, you know create a very attractive opportunity to build value in your business, which is what a lot of the larger firms are trying to do. Yeah. So it’s really exciting. So we we’ve been taking some time to just develop. What did we think was important in our proposition for the white label market and where do we see the best opportunities because you know to do this well? You need to have a sort of a repeatable process. You need to build this scale without building and lots of complexity. Lots of bespoken that actually you can’t openly support so, I’m. You know, we’ve got, as you mentioned, we’ve already got 11 or 12 white labels on our platform, different models. So we’ve got some that I would say are much more D2C models. We went live. With the LV a few months ago, which is actually an intermediary model, and then this sort of model where you’re bringing advisors and creating the model for them, we’ve got some very interesting conversations at the moment. And so yeah, and it’s a it’s I think it’s a great growth area. Actually. And I think it allows. We actually see it almost as a sort of sub part of the intermediary support that we’re providing because a lot of our conversations have actually come through relationships we already have on the intermediary side.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yes, I was going to. Say that, yeah, and so when you. You know, we talk about white labelled is it, are you going to also sort of what’s the word, Co manufacture with those companies or will you just offered a pure white label proposition?

Jackie Leiper

So I think our initial proposition will be, you know, be a sort of standard white label proposition. But the co-manufacturing is definitely possible. So certainly they’ll be once co-manufactured. Where we where we own different parts of it, and therefore the work we did with them was very much a sort of Co create. And building things that really I would imagine any of the advisors using the LV solution would only see it as LV, which is what exactly what we were. Trying to do. For them. So I think the co create is good. You just have to be just back to my point, we’re just thoughtful around how do we make sure we’re not trying to oversell the capabilities. Because of the whole point in doing this is as you know, to keep it really efficient, keep costs low and give the advisors of something that really fits with that proposition they’re trying to create for their customers.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Sounds great. And Jackie, you mentioned also some of them are D2C. So you you’ve I know that Embark supported various D2C platforms in the market, but also for for some of your banking competitors, Barclays is one of them I think and has that been an issue with your, with your competitors. Have they wanted to renegotiate terms, how have you handled that?

Jackie Leiper

Yeah. So it’s not Barclays, it’s NatWest, but it’s actually, yeah. Yeah. No, it’s OK. It’s been fine actually. So we run the white labels. You know, given some of the sort of competition law. And obviously you can imagine if you’re technically in competition with the parent company, you need to know and be confident that we’re managing that arms length. So the white label. Team in proposition is that that business is set. Up sort of stand alone if you like. Wait, they haven’t you know, they all had very competitive terms as you might imagine. We treat each of the white labels on their own merits. And they, you know. And it’s and again, it’s. It’s a neat solution for firms that perhaps don’t quite have the scale and expertise to go directly to, you know, one of the technology providers directly, you know with, with it’s FNZ or wherever else, whereas we’re doing all of the sort of design work for them, all of the development work. For them, it is a good way, I think, for firms to get into the platform space if you just don’t have that expertise in-house.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yeah, yeah, they can partner with you and obviously Lloyds has got, you know you mentioned the ready-made portfolios earlier and Lloyds has got a couple of D2C propositions. You’ve got the Halifax share dealing and the IWeb, et cetera, the D2C proposition that you’re going, you’re selling through the bank. The ready-made portfolios, will that be expanded into a bigger proposition for your bank consumers and non-bank consumers?

Jackie Leiper

So yes, definitely. So the ambition for direct consumer is to really have the full waterfront of options for customers. So you’re right, Halifax Share Dealing which trade under all of the bank brands again and it is hooked into Internet banking. So if you want to self-direct and pick all your own stocks, ETF, funds. You can do that on Halifax Share Dealing and that’s already part of the bank estate, if you like. And what we what we offer out and IWeb is the non-franchise part of that. So that is the brand for that. We’re customers that don’t bank with us can you know access the same self-directed proposition there they set the ready-made investments were always designed to really provide a proposition for people that are new to investing, so always bridge that gap for people that don’t feel confident to go straight to self-invested. And ready-made investments. But when we were developing it, we were essentially trying to target people that we could see had quite a lot of money sitting in cash and would be suitable for thinking about investment and was this a good way for them? To take that first step. Now interestingly, I mean, since we launched, we launched Ready-made investments. At the end of March, beginning of April. And we’ve had nearly 6000 new customers and 50% of those customers are under 35. So the target market, whilst we are get definitely getting new to investment, new to investment customers, they’re much younger than we expected. It’s really interesting. One of four are under 25 now. That this theory I’ve got there is it’s just partly it’s so easy and it’s and it’s, you know when the when you go on to take the account out because there aren’t a huge number of choices it just makes I do think sometimes you could have too much choice. Can’t you so? Having three funds, you know to choose from and then all you’re thinking about is how much you think you can afford to invest. And of course. All the frictions being taken out so you can do it on your phone. Yeah, You can put the money in straight from your bank account. So of course, it can see you just literally go tap-tap, over it comes done instantly.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

And I suppose you know, you’re right that too much choice is over can be really overwhelming. And you know, you only have to get on the tube in London and you see adverts for so many different firms. And I suppose for a for a bank customer, they see all these adverts. It’s their money. So they feel obviously, emotionally invested in investing. Being careful where they choose, where they put their money. So if it’s their bank and it’s available right there, then that’s going to give them a huge amount of reassurance that I’m really impressed that the age, the demographic that you’re attracting, that’s just great news, isn’t it? That’s.

Jackie Leiper

It’s great. I love. There’s one little thing. I’ve set myself a challenge on, which is the gender demographics are not quite as good, so we are.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Is it mainly men?

Jackie Leiper

But can you, did you? Did you get that? So about 70% are men, 30% female, now you. You know, I’m quite passionate about this area, we do loads of research in. This so my next part is looking at is it the language? Is it the way we’ve positioned some of it? Is it that you know it to do we need to do a little bit more maybe in this sort of educational phase. So the way we’ve set up, although it only takes a couple of minutes to take the product out, there’s quite a lot in the early stage where you know, prospective customers can play about have a look at the different fund choices. Read up on, you know, things like the ISA allowance and what’s investing all about that sort of thing. So I’m quite keen to develop better information and materials and things that will really, really appeal to women. So that would be a real target. For me, how do I get even that out? And get more girls.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yeah, it’s, I know it’s something that’s also close to my own heart. You know, we do need to encourage women. Women tend to be a bit, risk averse. But actually you. Know you almost need to get across to people that actually being risk averse is even is risky, you know, because you’re not making the most of your money, you’re not. So it’s about finding the right way to communicate with them, I suppose. Maybe you know? Saving for children, that kind of thing.

Jackie Leiper

Correct, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. Is it something that’s, you know, linked to something that feels more relevant around what you’d be saving for? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That’s the idea. So that.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Saving for your children. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so yeah, exactly.

Jackie Leiper

The yes, yes. We I think there’s loads of possibilities.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

It’s, it’s fascinating. It is really, really fascinating. And also the other thing, Jackie, is that you have this huge captive audience, you’ve got all of these bank clients who you know, as you, as you already said you, the bank knows how much they have. You know what you know, how much they earn. They’re spending habits. So you could target them as well by. I suppose communicating directly, emailing them directly. With suggestions, do you do that? Is that is that part of the?

Jackie Leiper

Yes, we do. Yeah, yes. So the way that. I mean, and to be honest, we’re in the early phases of learning what works and what doesn’t, so I’m happy to say that. But you’re absolutely right. So we e-mail them, we use prompts. So if you’re logging on to your bank account, we will, a little banner will appear or a little prompt. Now at the moment this isn’t quite as hyper personalised as I would like you know, and the ambition longer term. Across, to be honest, right across a lot of the banking propositions is to make this even more personalised so that it feels very, very specific to you. But at the moment it you know people are being prompted based on the sort of demographics and information that we can see and therefore the it makes. Yeah, little.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

They’re getting little nudges, yes.

Jackie Leiper

Exactly. It’s like think. About it, they hit little nudges. And we’re finding the e-mail campaigns are very successful. Actually I you know, I was thinking to people. Still do that to the read. Emails. But they do, yeah.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yeah, they do. They do.

Jackie Leiper

Yeah, they do and. Nudges. Nudges can be very successful, but there’s definitely something around timing. You can be very sophisticated. When the prompts appear and sort of optimum times and all that good stuff.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Ohh definitely, Anne and I will tell you we spend a lot of time, you know, thinking about when our emails go out to consumers, it’s everything is very carefully chosen because it can and it’s same with advisors you know for example there’s no point emailing advisors after a certain time of day. So everything is very finely tuned. So it’s fascinating, absolutely fascinating stuff, Jackie. And I’m really looking forward to seeing how the consumer proposition grows and expands. Cause, you know, just from past experience. Years back when Santander used to actively sell its multi manager funds through branches. We’re going back ten years ago, 10 years or more. They were the best selling funds in the UK. So it does, you know, if you if you’ve got that huge captive audience and you can see that people, you know, we all know that people should be investing for the long run. Nudging your client base and getting them to getting them to save and invest is really, really powerful.

Jackie Leiper

It really is I. Mean we can see that if you, if people are investing, even if it’s just, you know, into an ISA initially. They are more engaged, so, you know, interestingly, when you can see your investments alongside your bank account, it really transforms the way you think about your investments. You’re more likely to put more money in because. You know, it’s just more top of mind. So at the moment people on their Internet banking are all you know are on their accounts almost every day now. So I think it’s something like 26 visits and one born average customer makes, yeah.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Really. Gosh.

Jackie Leiper

Yeah, yeah, I. Almost everyday and obviously you can imagine there will be some demographics where it absolutely is every day. And therefore they’re seeing that investment everyday now. When you’ve got volatile markets, I was always a little bit worried when they start panicking a little bit. You know, when you when markets bounce up and down because obviously. They see that every day as well and actually. I think it’s really helped customers get more comfortable with how investments work and the fact that you know they do track the market and at points they’ll surge ahead and then they might drop back. And therefore, if it’s helping to get people to just understand some of those rudimentary elements. Surely that’s a good thing, and surely that helps when you think about retirement planning and saving for retirement as well.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yeah. And the whole sort of pound cost averaging, if you know, if you know you’re putting in a small amount every month, whether the markets you know, if the markets are down, then your money’s going to buy more. The markets are you know, so there’s always ways of getting that message across. But in the long run, yes, people should be they know they’ll benefit from investing so.

Jackie Leiper

I was thinking have you been looking at one of our messages? That’s one of the things that we’ve been pulsing out to them to say actually this is a good time to buy when you see this, you know so. That’s exactly the type of thing I think you can really make very simple and be very timely and really just help build confidence generally in in our products, yeah.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Well, yeah. So we, our sister company runs a consumer comparison tool. It’s called compare and invest.co.uk. So consumers can go on there and they can look at all the different platforms that are available to them. So, so all this messaging that you’re talking about we have been sort of putting all that messaging together for years and sending that out to consumers. I’ll send you a bit more info on it Jackie will send it to your team. Yes, because I think it you might find that quite interesting. So I wanted to ask you, you’re an ambitious lady and an you’ve got strong, you know, high ambitions for the Scottish Widows platform for the whole proposition. Where do you see yourself in five years’ time? Where do you see, do you see it as a top three platform? What? You know what?

Jackie Leiper

Yeah, that, that’s my ambition. I would be over the moon if we were top three platform and we’ve been able to do that by building through the different channels we’ve talked about, so. I you know. When I’ve been talking to my teams internally. We talk about, you know, being that platform of choice. Whether you’re coming to us as an end customer coming to us as an intermediary or coming through as a workplace, yeah, exactly. Now, actually, I think I touched on it a little bit when we were talking about annuities. You know my next phase is, you know, if you like the next sort of six months or so are just almost filling some of the gaps on the platform, so bringing. Some of those D2C sipp propositions that I mentioned. That we’ve got a huge amount that we’re doing on the intermediary side, but beyond that is then how do you almost connect up the platform with these other propositions, so that advisers are going to the one place and. For a customer, I think the biggest single opportunity is how do you really help on the retirement side of things in decumulation and that and. That’s what you. Know we’re very keen to develop next. You know, how do we really make sure that we can support customers once they’ve started investing? In say in. With us all the way through into decumulation.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yeah. Cradle to grave, almost.

Jackie Leiper

Yes, exactly. Exactly, exactly. And you cause you’re again, you’re back to your point. You’re building up so much knowledge about them, so you could be very personalised around. How? How you support customers.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Exactly right. And you’re a bank, you know, obviously they trust you to, you know, the, the whole point is you know they trust you enough to bank with you. So they’re obviously going to invest with you and it’s it will make it gives people that reassurance, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Jackie Leiper

It does, I think, and I think. We see a lot of this where people are concerned about, you know our customers going to go under, you know the current volatility, in particular, and even that little run that we saw with some of the American banks, but you know this Lloyds bank is the biggest UK bank retail bank and being part of that this these are the benefits for us you know you have got the investment and support from the parent group and in return we can join up propositions for customers that use the services of the group.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Yes indeed. So Jackie, one last question it we’ve had a very tough market in the last couple of years. Interest rates from the on the rise, it’s been very volatile. The cost of living has had an impact on people saving and investing. Although I’m really impressed by your ready-made number of number of ready-made clients. Do you worry about the market or do you do you think that this is, you know is just a bit of a lag and things will continue to grow in, in the way they had previously?

Jackie Leiper

I do worry about the market. I mean I have never been so grateful that I’ve got almost the sort of waterfront products that I’ve got so the workplace savings business has been incredibly resilient. In the current environment, you know the auto enrolment being part of that, you know people are auto enrolled and actually the wage inflation that we’ve seen has flown through and to increase contributions actually.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Really. That’s good. That’s good.

Jackie Leiper

Yeah, yeah.

Jackie Leiper

So it’s actually ahead of where we expected to be in terms of new contributions and where and that’s offset. Where we’ve seen downturns in new flows coming into the market on, on the individual side and then the stockbroking business, the share dealing business that we’ve got has been incredibly resilient. We had our. An absolutely stellar ISA season, despite actually ISA season being probably pretty challenged right across. And they’re part of that. But it was all to do with how we partnered through the banking relationships. So you. Know we were running incentives and you know things that that just really targeted and we and we really we bucked the market trends on ISA through the Halifax share dealing business. So I hear. When I’ve got all those different things and. I look at it together. I can weather the storms. That I’m seeing. In the pure. Intermediary sort of individual market at the moment.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

So that’s really interesting. So because you know obviously when you it’s D2C so it’s funds, it’s investments, it’s everything. But it goes to show doesn’t. It that the right marketing and the right comms can encourage people to invest. So that’s it. Yeah, that’s.

Jackie Leiper

Yes. Yes, it’s quite. Interesting. So we were to, you know, being blatant. We were targeting switchers, so customers that we knew were using other D2C platforms. We can see the money getting paid away so we can, you know, we can be. Quite targeted there and.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

Of course, yes, yeah.

Jackie Leiper

And that and that’s and that. Works very well for us so. You. So it’s good to. Have different levers and. I think that’s probably, you know, when people say. To me. Oh wait. A minute direct consumer and intermediary and you. Know and workplace. These are the benefits of having all of these that you. Can use that actually to support the growth and keep going with your growth programmes, even when markets are challenged.

Bella Caridade-Ferreira

That’s a very, very interesting point. And yes, you do have a robust multi channel business model. Yeah, so it’s fantastic. That’s actually Jackie. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground now and I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to me today and telling me all about your business, your, plans are fascinating. And I really wish you well with them and I look forward to seeing the business grow from go from strength to strength.

Jackie Leiper

Thank you, Bella. Always a pleasure.