“There was a core bunch of people driving this change… Ian and Bill were part of this landscape and drove change through a fusty old sector.”
The ‘filing cabinet’ analogy is one that Taylor also used in an interview with FT Adviser in 2020.
He said: “Many years ago it took [advisers] about four or five years to work with Transact, but by the time they did, they found they had fewer clients but better clients, rather than a filing cabinet full of policies and customers they had sold to.”
But one of the best examples of how platforms revolutionised the advice industry relates to the Retail Distribution Review.
The Financial Conduct Authority has, since December 31 2012, required investment advisers to set their own charges for their services, instead of receiving commission from providers. But Transact had already introduced compulsory adviser charging in 2000.
“In losing people like Bill and Ian, we lose some of the original luminaries who set us on that part of that journey from fund supermarket to wrap to, frankly, the way that we do business now,” says Mann.
He says that in the early days of Selestia (which Vasilieff co-founded) and Transact, Vasilieff and Taylor began to think about what a wrap platform could include.
“It could include tools, it could include settlements, it could include a vast array of things; and out of that revolutionary thinking grew the wrap market that we have today.”
Indeed, after Old Mutual’s acquisition of Skandia in 2006, it was through the integration of Skandia Multifunds and Selestia from which Quilter Wealth Solutions was formed.
Mann joined Skandia in 2008 at a time when the two were coming together, and when asked what his impressions were of the Selestia platform, he says: “What impressed me was the thinking.
“But the thing that impressed me most was the speed from thinking to execution. They took the concept like digitisation, which to us in the institutional world was just a word, and they made it a reality.
“And they didn’t have huge budgets. Selestia particularly, and Transact in the very early days, were built with marketing and development budgets that would be a fraction of what people are spending today.
“But the thing that really impressed us about the Selestia guys was the clarity of thought and the execution capability.”
Challenging the thinking is something that both Vasilieff and Taylor did, says Mann. “If I looked at the commonality between the two, they were restless innovators.
“They were always thinking about the illogicality of some of the ways that we do things and reimagining the way that things could be done. There was a movement of people like that… [and] they were seen as part of that movement.
