'Platforms have been a barrier to advisers using ETFs'

Speaking this morning (27 February) at a roundtable led by platform technology provider Winterflood Business Services, Novia CEO Bill Vasilieff said advisers were "still quite nervous" about ETFs and "don't really understand them", noting 5% to 6% of Novia's business now comes through ETFs. "The vast majority of that is through discretionary fund managers [DFMs], who use them quite widely," he explained. "One of the reasons why they use them is because you can get ETFs a lot cheaper with much more choice than you can mutual funds.  "The other reason is there is increasingly a blurring...