We're kick-starting a series of articles based on our HomeGames sessions with platform chief execs. First up is Standard Life Aberdeen CEO of Adviser Platforms Noel Butwell - you can also watch the full discussion between Noel and Mark on YouTube below.

Following the sale of the Standard Life brand to Phoenix, in April we announced plans to rebrand to our new name of Abrdn. That brand will be formally launched later this year.

By way of background, we’d licensed the Standard Life brand to Phoenix for almost three years, and there were several different brands within the Standard Life Aberdeen stable , such as Aberdeen Standard Investments, 1825 and Aberdeen Standard Capital, and then all the individual brands at product or proposition level.

What this does is simplify all of that. Wrap and Elevate remain very much part of what is currently Standard Life Aberdeen and what will become Abrdn, and are a key part of our growth and focus as a business.

Phoenix will still operate in the market with the Standard Life brand but concentrating on off-platform retail products.

The business is still the same, and the people are still the same. People are what make a brand really – I remember being told “The people are always warmer than the buildings.” That’s what creates the culture in an organisation.

But at the same time, the business has changed. We’ve been signalling for some time we would operate under one identity and one brand. I think the rebrand signals a reshaping of the business, and how we are going to operate in future.

The response to the rebrand

What I’d say about the rebrand is the worst thing that could have happened is that we launched the brand and nobody said a word. I thought Phil Young’s recent article in Money Marketing was pretty balanced, and caught the tone and sentiment of what we’re trying to do.

It’s definitely created a view and comment in the market. And not many organisations that do what we do and of our size end up on Have I Got News For You. So I think that was a highlight!

More seriously, when you change things you should get an emotional response. The trust still exists, because we’re still the same organisation doing the same things.

But the key now is for us to demonstrate and build what I would call ‘brand equity’. We need to build that both in terms of how we work with advisers, and how that’s positioned with their clients.

In many ways, the rebrand happening when it does is almost a happy accident, given our plans for the second half of the year. Working under a new brand gives us an opportunity to say: “This is a very different organisation now to the one you’ve been dealing with before.”

We’re still very respectful and grateful for where we’ve come from, but we’re going to differentiate and compete differently, and work with advisers in a different way.

Outsourcing and innovation

We’ve been working with FNZ for 15 years, and that relationship has gone from strength to strength.

While it’s true that a number of other platform providers use FNZ technology, like Quilter and Aviva, for me it’s no different than the dynamic between Amazon Originals and Netflix.

Both use Amazon Web Services as the underlying technology, and where they try to compete and differentiate is around content and experience.

The same goes for us and our competitors, regardless of whether the underlying technology is outsourced or proprietary.  

It comes down to being very clear about what you want to do as a platform and what you don’t want to do. FNZ are very good at custody and administration, and that’s what we’ve outsourced. The bit that we want to control and own is the user experience and the content that goes onto the platforms.

There are some great examples of firms where proprietary technology works really well for them.

We made the decision to partner with FNZ, and we’re very happy with that, but it's based on being very clear on what FNZ does and very clear on what we'll do. And what we’ll do is focus on how we best serve our adviser partners and compete with our competitors.

There has been innovation among some of the smaller players in the platform market and I watch, welcome and fear it in equal measure. My team and I would be negligent in our roles if we weren’t watching, and in some cases emulating, what they’re doing.

Arguably, when you get to an organisation of our size, your ability to react to market changes and to push through change can be more difficult than some of these more nimble, fleet of foot fintech start-ups. But I don’t think size is the issue as much as the way of working inside a business.

Being very honest here, over the last three to five years we haven’t listened enough to our adviser partners; the firms we work for.

51% of adviser businesses could use Wrap or Elevate today. But the reason some of them don’t is because we’ve not listened to what it is they want from us.

While you can never do everything that everybody wants, there are certain things a number of firms have been asking us for many years that we’ve not done, largely because we’ve prioritised our next big stadium build innovation.

Some of these have worked fantastically well, like our investment hub. But there are other things we’ve done that we probably felt were the right thing, and this might be where people attach a certain arrogance to Standard Life, or that ‘Standard Life always knows best’. We probably haven’t listened, but now we are listening.

Under my tenure, for the period that I’m in charge of this business, it will be very much focused on listening to advisers and delivering what they want.

So, will we innovate? Absolutely we’ll continue to innovate, and some of the things we’ll bring through between now and the end of the year I think are pretty innovative. What we did on the drawdown price lock, for instance, I thought that was pretty innovative.

We’ll continue to do that, but not at the expense of the platform experience, its usability and its intuitiveness. So expect significant enhancements on that front over the course of this year.

A bit about me

I’ve been with Standard Life for almost 18 years now. I previously worked with National Provident Institution, owned by Australian firm AMP.

Back in 2003, the market bombed and I was made redundant. I got a call out of the blue that summer from Paul Matthews, who ultimately went on to become the CEO of Standard Life until 2017. He brought me into the business, and I worked in various sales and distribution roles until I became sales director.

Around two years ago, I got a call from the then group chief exec who advised me I was going to become the CEO of Standard Life. Over these last two years, who would have envisaged what we’ve been through, particularly the last year. So that’s been a bit of a baptism of fire in my first proper full year as CEO.

Books-wise, I regularly go through the whole series of The Adventures of Tintin – I’m a massive fan of Tintin for what it’s worth.

I read quite a lot of fiction, and I’m reading one of favourite books at the moment which is London by Edward Rutherfurd, a fabulous book about the history of one of my favourite cities in the world.

I have a bookcase full of what you’d call business books or leadership books that I’ve been given, but I never read them. They’re full of heroic deeds, but they’re not necessarily books that I really want to read.

Being easy to use

When advisers come to us with issues, it’s usually to do with client servicing and account management – it is to do with issue resolution. So a big part of what we’re doing, particularly with the enhancements we’re planning, is the removal of that need for issue resolution.  

Sometimes the nature of the servicing team’s calls are things the adviser could either do themselves or find out themselves on the platform. The problem is this isn’t easy to do.

A big change we’re making is to make the platform much more intuitive, so that advisers can get the information they want easily, but at the same time we will still provide a service, so that if advisers want to, they can still pick up the phone to us.

Our front office telephony has improved dramatically since the pandemic eye of the storm, but actually it’s about how do we make our platforms really easy to use.

I talk about making them the easiest platforms to use. I know we’re not there yet, but that’s what I’m working with the team to deliver.

Access to advice

When we launched our advice business 1825, I remember conversations with our board at the time around whether we would be seen to be competing with our key partners.

Clearly the market has moved on since then, what with the RDR and pension freedoms. I think we’re now in a golden age for advice – supply and demand are hugely out of kilter, and advisers are capacity constrained.

We know people will always get better outcomes when they get advice.

You can read any number of surveys that point to perhaps 10 million people who would benefit from advice, including hybrid and digital advice services. Yet the current number of people being served by an adviser is about one million.

I understand adviser concern around competition, but we’re not going to compete with you.

A big organisation like ours is never going to compete to provide the level of personal service that advice firms do because we can't do that at scale. We've got very strict protocols and policies in place and we'll never ever target an adviser’s client, that will never happen.

We have a direct-to-consumer business, a digital offering and an advice business. But I think the fact that more people are getting advice generally is something we should celebrate.

For example, I don’t think Vanguard's recent entry into the UK advice market will lead to disintermediation.

We’ve believed for a while it will introduce price pressure, because that's what they trade on.

But if it means more people are getting advice and they're not competing directly with the vast majority of advice firms because they couldn't and wouldn't, then honestly I don't think that's a bad thing.

Looking ahead, I think we will see the emergence of bigger advice brands.

That’s probably positive, as right now there’s no obvious place or brand for people to go to for advice. But at the same time I just hope that we don’t lose that personal touch.

Advice businesses across the length and breadth of the country do a fantastic job for people, helping them with the level of money they've got and to look forward to a future with some level of dignity.

That's why I think it's a noble profession. I just hope we continue to have that.

Financial services is a great industry but we just need to a) believe in it and b) shout about it a little bit more. And that's my commitment to people that I'll certainly do that.