The Homepage sets out what I produce. This page is about what happens when you actually put it to work.
The advice is excellent.
Nobody sees the advice.
Markets fall sharply. The phone starts ringing. Clients who seemed perfectly relaxed six months ago are asking whether they should move everything to cash.
Most firms respond reactively. A hastily written email. A brief note saying 'stay the course' without ever explaining why. Or, worse still, nothing at all, which leaves clients to fill the silence with whatever alarming headline they happened to read that morning.
Having a volatility communication ready to go changes that picture entirely. Within hours of a significant market event, your clients receive a measured, well-written piece that explains what happened, places it in historical context, and shows clearly that you had already thought about this possibility. That single piece of communication can do more to retain clients than a full year of review meetings.
Most firms will recognise the annual review where a client asks, carefully and politely, whether they really still need to be paying ongoing fees. Regular, well-written content tends to answer that question before it ever gets raised.
A quarterly market commentary shows your thinking. A research-backed guide on investor behaviour demonstrates that your value extends well beyond fund selection. Material that reaches clients between review meetings is tangible evidence of ongoing expertise and continued attention to their interests.
Firms that communicate well between meetings rarely face that fee conversation at all. The ones that only make contact when the annual review is coming up almost invariably do.
Good content gives existing clients something genuinely worth sharing, not because you have asked them to, but because it earns that response on its own merits. A guide that addresses the questions their colleagues are quietly asking. A commentary that gets forwarded in a WhatsApp group because it is actually useful. That kind of distribution does not happen with content that reads like a brochure.
Consumer Duty requires documented evidence of good outcomes. Not assertions, not good intentions, not a compliant process in the abstract. Evidence. The FCA's working assumption is that if the documentation does not exist, the outcome is treated as not having been achieved.
Firms that commission a Fair Value Assessment, an Outcomes Monitoring Framework and a board-ready annual Consumer Duty report have a defensible evidence base to point to. Firms that do not are effectively relying on the FCA not looking too closely. That is becoming a less comfortable position to be in.
The commercial and regulatory versions of this problem are, at root, the same problem seen from different angles. A client who wants to know whether the ongoing fee is justified needs to see evidence of ongoing service. The FCA examining whether a firm's charges represent fair value needs precisely the same evidence, just presented in a different form.
Regularly commissioned content, whether quarterly commentaries, client guides or market updates, produces timestamped records of service delivery for every client who receives it. A Fair Value Assessment that can point to that kind of delivery record is considerably more defensible than one that has nothing concrete to refer to.
Every deliverable includes a written compliance assessment mapping content against applicable provisions.
Content commissions build the ongoing service delivery records that underpin a Fair Value Assessment. Consumer Duty documentation creates the evidentiary framework within which your content can demonstrate its value. These are not two separate services that happen to come from the same person. They are parts of the same compliance infrastructure, and they work better together than either does alone.
