David Ferguson: Money for nothing, bps for free

There's a spectacular level of discussion on the topic of value for money in financial services at present. Much of it is well-founded, for there are still too many people making too much money delivering too little. At the risk of getting a bit Einstein, it seems that much of this is about relativity. What are the relative costs of delivering each element of the value chain and what is the relative value when compared with what customers were doing before. Our data (ie facts) tells us that ongoing fees are falling right along the chain, down around 8% for advice, 12% for us and about...