Bigger isn't always better

Platforms are on the march; rarely a month goes by without news of another milestone, whether it is AXA’s platform passing £2bn, Hargreaves Lansdown’s assets under management (AUM) rising 41% to £24bn or news that the platform market in the UK has ballooned to £164bn in assets. All these stories have one thing in common – AUM, which seems to have become the de-facto metric for measuring platform success. Targets get set in terms of it, companies are ranked based on it and people occasionally get fired for not delivering enough of it. But is the platform industry right to obsess about jus...