Gosling's Grouse: Reviewing RDR

Has it improved the industry?

A couple of weeks ago the founder of the Platform Awards, CWC Research's Clive Waller, penned an article in an adviser magazine suggesting if he were setting up an advice business today it would be a restricted one.

He pointed out that since the advent of the Retail Distribution Review (RDR), dozens of high-quality independent firms have been bought up by larger players as scale is the route forward. Increasingly, we are seeing what is usually called a vertically-integrated business model. Put simply, the bigger a firm gets, the more clients and distribution routes it controls and so it makes sense to sell more of its own products to those clients. And if those products are not directly considered its own - such as DFM investment solutions - they are in effect, because they already have a capt...