We ignore the lessons of BHS and Austin Reed at our peril

In my previous article, I discussed this year's Personal Investment Marketing Show, better known as ‘PIMS'. Among its benefits is the opportunity to use the convivial surroundings to put our industry under the microscope and inevitably, by the end of the evening, discuss how to solve all problems and put the financial world to rights. The conversations can be quite limited and tend to be parochial in terms of the financial world. So I posed a question - how can it be that two businesses, with a retail pedigree that stretches back more than 200 years, face disappearing off our high street...