I went to a book launch event yesterday evening in the hope that I might learn something useful for the forthcoming launch of my book No Small Change, co-written with Anthony Thomson, which I think I may have mentioned.

Amidst the drinks and canapes, there was a presentation and panel discussion which lasted an hour or so.  Naturally the author spoke, and the panel also included a couple of quite impressively heavy hitters from the financial world, with a well-known journalist chairing.

There were over a hundred people present, in a long, narrow room where many of us were a long way from the stage.  So it was a pity that three out of the four speakers’ microphones didn’t work so we couldn’t hear them, and neither did the roving mike so the audience’s questions from the floor were inaudible either to the panel, or to the rest of the audience, or both.  Also, the laptop projecting a very large image behind the panel went onto standby every five minutes, so that the title slide disappeared and was replaced by a huge and distractingly day-glo green message saying NO SIGNAL.

By now you may well have guessed the punchline, which is that the book is about how rapidly and how fundamentally IT is changing the world.  We are, the author tells us, in the middle of a gigantic digital revolution which is utterly transforming how the 7.5 billion people on earth relate and connect to each other, with thrilling and largely unimaginable consequences for the way we live our lives.

I didn’t see any evidence that anyone else noticed the irony of the fact that these messages were being delivered in an environment in which the technology present was actively preventing the people in the room from relating and connecting to each other, but I don’t think it can have only been me.

Note to self:  when launching a book about financial services marketing, make sure the launch marketing isn’t too shabby.

Ha ha, very funny, a blog about jargon with some really difficult words in the headline.  (As you, ahem, already know, “prognostications” = predictions, “jejune” = naive or simplistic.)

In the ordinary way, we get rid of difficult words by doing what I did just then – replacing them with easier words.   In the book (did I mention the book?), the example I give is the rather lovely word “crepuscular.”  Not many people know it, but the problem is solved as soon as you know it means “relating to twilight.”  Immediately, you know a whole lot of things about “crepuscular” – what it means, what it looks like, when it happens, why it happens (more or less).

Contrast that with an unfamiliar word from the language of investment jargon.  To make my point, I’m choosing a tough one:  “equalisation.”  There’s absolutely no way that any better-known phrase or synonym will cast light on this.  There isn’t one.  The word describes an aspect of the workings of investment funds, which you’re never going to understand unless you learn practically a whole book’s-worth of stuff about how investment funds work (starting, for many people, with an explanation of what investment funds actually are).

Here’s an attempt from a website (actually Neil Woodford’s) to explain the term.

“Equalisation is a mechanism used by open-ended collective investment vehicles to ensure that income distributions from a fund can be the same for all shareholders, regardless of when the shares were purchased.

By way of background, funds that distribute income do so regularly – sometimes yearly, sometimes half-yearly, quarterly or monthly. In the case of the LF Woodford Equity Income Fund, income is distributed quarterly. When a fund pays out income, it does so by going ‘ex-dividend‘ (XD). Income that is received by the fund from its underlying portfolio holdings is reflected in that fund’s net asset value until it goes ex-dividend, at which point the income is removed from the fund’s net asset value and is paid to shareholders on the pay date on a per share basis, typically several weeks after the ex-dividend date.

If an investor has bought shares in the fund since the last XD date, he/she has not held the shares for the full period over which income is being received by the fund and so those shares will be grouped separately (usually known as group 2 shares, whereas all other shares are in group 1). When it comes to payment of income on those shares, they will be entitled to the same payment per share as any other shares in the fund, but not all of the payment will be treated as income for tax purposes – part of the payment will be treated as a return of capital. This is known as an ‘equalisation’ payment, because it equalises the per share amount that is paid on group 2 shares with that paid on group 1.  Once group 2 shares have passed their first XD date, they become group 1 shares.”

I can’t find the words to express how utterly unhelpful this definition is to most of us.  Within a dozen words most people’s heads have disappeared below the surface, and they never come back up again.  So it’s “a mechanism used by open-ended collective investment vehicles,” is it?  Great.  That really helps me.  Not.

I’m not saying this to beat up the Woodford website.  I’ve had a go at explaining equalisation once or twice, and I don’t think I did any better.  My point is that often, in financial services, a single word of incomprehensible jargon is in fact the tip of a vast iceberg of incomprehension, so that if you want to make sense of the word you have to melt the whole bloody iceberg.  And, of course, long before you complete that enormous task, everyone will have left your website in search of something – anything! – more rewarding.

In the case of this particular example, you can argue that people really don’t need to know – that millions of people invest perfectly happily in funds without any understanding of equalisation, or indeed any idea of the existence of the concept.  But there are hundreds of other terms that are, or at least seem to be, much more important if people are going to make half-decent investment decisions.  (Pound-cost averaging is always a horrible one to have to explain.  Or rebalancing.  Or index tracking, to people who don’t know what an index is.)

Even after 30 years of writing this stuff, I don’t really have an answer.  Basically, the choice you have if you want to de-jargonify is to be either incomprehensibly brief, or unreadably long, which isn’t really much of a choice.

So, I’m sorry if this blog has turned out to be a bit of a waste of time.  But on the upside, at least you now know what “crepuscular” means.

Did I mention that I’ve been writing a book lately?  Or that it’s called No Small Change and is available for advance order on Amazon?  Oh, I did, did I?  Sorry about that.

Writing a book makes you think about things so that you have something to say when you write about them.  One of the things that my co-author Anthony Thomson and I had to think about was the question of what should, and what shouldn’t, be included within our definition of “retail financial services.”  And without more than a few moments’ deliberation, we decided that gambling – whether in casinos, on sporting events or on who’ll replace Theresa May and when – was out.

If you think harder about it, this was a questionable decision.  As consumers in group discussions never tire of telling us, perceptually gambling exists at the right-hand end of a financial services spectrum which has mainstream investing roughly in the middle or towards the middle-right, and building society savings over to the left.  And in fact there are other things over towards that right-hand end which are undoubtedly gambles, but which are undoubtedly financial services too – things like spread betting, CFDs and these scary-sounding newish things called Binary Options.  At the end of the day, they’re all about putting money in and hopefully, though not probably, getting more money out.

So why did AT and I take seconds to exclude gambling from the book?

I guess partly it’s that gambling doesn’t present itself in any way as a part of the financial services world.  Gambling as seen on TV, at any rate, presents itself overwhelmingly as part of the world of sport – presented by football commentators and pundits, and featuring people, mostly young men plus Ray Winstone,either playing or watching the game and occasionally doing things on their phones while other youngish men plus Ray Winstone shout at us on the soundtrack.

But as financial services marketing professionals, AT and I aren’t taken in by this determination to break the category rules.  Plenty of other brands do that – how about animated meerkats? – but Comparethemarket.com is still part of the financial services world.

No, I think the reason we made the decision to leave it out was simply that we hate it, don’t want anything to do with it and definitely don’t want it cluttering up our book.  The business is horrible, the propositions are horrible and above all the advertising is horrible.  There’s a lot wrong with financial services, and it’s taking a distressingly long time to put it right.  But thank God we’re not working in gambling.

Looking back at entries in this blog written before the Great Suspension (i.e.before April 2016) I’m surprised how many of them are about robo advice.  This is a subject that still feels like fairly new news to me, or at least like a fairly new (as well as stupid) name.  But in fact I was grumbling about the stupidity of the name back in late 2015, and expressing major doubts about the viability of the whole concept at the same time.

The viability doubts all focused, one way or another, on a single issue:  are we sure there are enough consumers out there who are keen to engage with services like these?  As I’ve said a million times, there is certainly a small number of enthusiastic investment “hobbyists,” who love everything to do with investing and make up the bulk of the customer bases of most established D2C investment services (particularly Hargreaves Lansdown).  But is it the case that just below them in the pyramid there are a few million potential investors, ready to become more engaged and active if only they could find a nice, simple, accessible service which they felt comfortable with?

There is undoubtedly a “next level down” more or less like this in a great many markets, and welcoming them in with that nice, simple accessible new option can be a very successful and profitable thing to do.  I could argue that in (fairly) recent years this has been the secret of the success of car manufacturers with “hot hatchbacks” from the Golf GTi onwards;  of the “casual dining” sector with restaurant brands including Cafe Rouge, Frankie & Benny’s, Carluccio’s and Nando’s, among dozens of others;  and in a slightly different way of the game-changing success of low-cost airlines like easyJet, Ryanair and Norwegian.

But is it true in investment?  Of course the “next level down” investment brands will pick up some business from curious, promiscuous hobbyists, just as my automotive, restaurant and airline examples  have done.  But that’s not how you make the big money – you make the big money when you find the formula that expands the market.

In robo advice, I’ve never believed that any of the existing players has come up with a propositiion anything like simple enough, a brand anything like appealing enough or a marketing budget anything like big enough to become the GTi, Cafe Rouge or easyJet of the sector.

It seems that quite a few of the existing players share my doubts, because one thing that has been happening while I’ve been away is that a number have been partnering with, or indeed being acquired by, big institutions who, it’s believed, can give them access to millions of warm customers and wonderfully nice low cost.

This blog, indeed, has been triggered by an announcement of another of these partnerships, with the oddly-named Scalable Capital partnering in some sort of way with Dutch bank ING.  (Is it just me, or is there something a bit troublingly reptilian about that “Scalable”?)   Blackrock already owns a big slice of Scalable, and of course Aviva has bought Wealthify,  LV= owns Wealth Wizards and Schroders has invested a lot of money into Nutmeg.

At boardroom level, I’m sure all these deals make excellent sense.  But out there in the market?   I’m still not detecting much excitement in the pyramid’s middle tier

To be honest, I can’t actually remember if we develop this theme in our forthcoming book on financial services marketing, No Small Change, written jointly by my old friend Anthony Thomson and myself and due for publication in the last week of May.  All I can say is that there may well be.  I’ll give you the pre-ordering details as soon as I have them,. and you can find out for yourself..

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Back in the day, one of the themes that came up time after time in this blog was about people who are in the industry asking too much of people who aren’t.  We say things that are too difficult for most to understand and come up with products that are too complicated for most to use.

For decades, the result has been that many of the ideas that we’ve intended for ordinary people have been taken up by people who aren’t ordinary at all.  Investment services like Nutrmeg, for example, originally intended fore the inexperienced investor, find to their surprise that their customer base consists largely of exactly the same “hobbyist” customers as existing, mainstream investments.  The supposedly mass market Pension Wise guidance service is mostly used by hobbyist retirees fine-tuning their knowledge and their options.  A few years ago Stakeholder Pensions, intended as the most mass-market of all long-term investments, were principally adopted by affluent hobbyists as a way of boosting their tax-free contributions (they opened plans in the names of their kids, nannies and cleaners).

It’s early days, but I’d say the signs are that it’s happening again, this time around the big and potentially game-changing idea that’s called Open Banking.  So far, I’ve failed to understand more or less all the media coverage that I’ve noticed – but the one message that has come across is that Open Banking makes it easy for me to see the state of all of my finances in one place.

To hobbyists, and crucially within that term I include the very large majority of people working in the industry, that sounds great.  It’s a self-evident good.  Of course I’d like to be able to see all my finances in one place.  It would be really interesting.  And useful.

To most of the rest of us, it’s a proposition that’s of no interest at all.  We’re not that interested in looking at our financial position at all, whether they’re in one place, or a few places, or lots.  It’s about as useful and appealing as being able to look at all our books in one place.  Or all our houseplants.  Or all our carpets.

These are things that we don’t really look at very much at all, and when we do we’re perfectly happy if they’re not in the same place as other similar things.  It’s a bit irritating if we’re looking for a particular book and can’t find it, but it’s not a problem often and we know where to find the ones we refer to frequently.

There are things which it obviously is convenient to keep in one place – clothes, for example, or cutlery, or music (whether physical or virtual).  These tend to be things that we need to choose from frequently, and/or to put together in combinations (whether place settings, outfits or playlists).  Financial services don’t come into this category.

Once you’ve put your financial products together in one place, there is of course the potential for some enormous second-order benefits.  It’s possible to save a great deal of money, to take advantage of propositions that meet your needs much better and do the financial things you need to do a whole lot more easily (I’ve been told a hundred times in the last few months about the imminent arrival of the “one-click mortgage.”

These are all great and exciting things, and could form the basis for simple, understandable propositions that might actually cut through and engage people.  (The role model, as so often in this blog, is of course price comparison sites, which have cut through and engaged through a winning combination of simplicity of proposition and hugeness of ad spend.)

It may well be that eventually Open Banking will reduce down into similarly powerful, simple messages expressed with similarly huge ad budgets.  But for the time being, it’s hobbyist speaking only unto fellow hobbyist.  Most of us absolutely aren’t excited at all.

In the old, pre-sabbatical blog, that would have been the end.  However, in the new born-again.blog it isn’t.  The plan is now to close, pretty much invariably, with a plug for the book.  It includes a lot more on this theme, our habit of asking too much of our customers and over-estimating their level of interest in the financial services world.  You can’t pre-order it on Amazon yet – but when you can, you’ll be the first to know.

Whenever I talk to anyone about the book, the first thing they always want to know is when it’s going to be published.  Embarrassingly, though, even at this late stage, I still don’t really know.  To be fair, while the uncertainty was initially down to our publishers, the tables have now been turned and it’s now pretty much entirely down to my co-author:  the publishers have told us that we’re now clear to make our final approach and touch down in the second half of April, but at that time Anthony is in the middle of an exhausting programme of long-haul travel and will be, consecutively, in Bahrain, the US, Peru, Chile and Australia during the crucial period.

This is obviously unhelpful from a PR point of view because, let’s not kid ourselves, “Europe’s leading challenger banker writes financial marketing book” is the story here.  It’s not particularly helpful from a patience-of-his-co-author point of view either – after all, I basically finished writing the thing last summer, and have been circling over Rickmansworth waiting for clearance to land ever since.

And of course there is a fairly serious danger that in this fast-changing world,  by the time it finally appears it’ll be terribly out of date.  If so, then hopefully judging by previous examples it’ll only be out of date in detail, not in its main themes and conclusions.  While researching the chapter on data-driven marketing, for example, I was amazed by the strategic foresight and prescience of Peppers’ and Rogers’ 1994 masterwork The One-To-One Future – despite their firm conviction that the emerging one-to-one media that were about to transform consumer marketing were the fax machine, something called “interactive radio” and seat-back advertising screens on aircraft.

I shall have to go back over our manuscript and look for signs of similar misjudgments.  I suspect all those prices quoted in groats and guineas are going to have to go.

A bit less than two years, but a bit more than eighteen months – long enough to raise a question about whether I’m restarting my old blog, or starting a new one.

Definitely the former, I think.  For one thing, in purely practical terms I don’t know how to start a new blog.  And for another, content-wise, I’m sure I’m going to be picking up exactly where this one left off, repeatedly running through a grab-bag of half-a-dozen riffs more or less beating up financial services marketers for not being nicer to their customers.

There is one difference, though.  As I hope will become increasingly clear, this time around I’m riffing with a purpose – the purpose being to encourage both my readers to trade up, in due course, from free-to-read blog to £29.99-to-buy tome on the same narrow seam of subject matter.  When I put the blog on hold in April 2016 I said my aim was to free up some headspace to write (or rather co-write) a book about financial services marketing.  To my surprise and relief, this has turned out to be true.  The book is written, and at some point in the first half of 2018 it will be published by leading business publishers Wiley.

(I still have to say “at some point” because at the moment we haven’t resolved a bit of a timing nightmare concerning my co-author. leading challenger banker Anthony Thomson.  Being a (or indeed the) leading challenger banker seems to involve a relentless schedule of long-haul travel, interspersed only with the odd day or two every now and then in this country,  We haven’t yet landed (pun intended) on an odd day or two sufficient for the task of squeezing in a book launch, but it looks like some time in May.

Between now and then, my plan is to build up to a crescendo of excitement so that on P-Day both of this blog’s readers are desperate to lay their hands on a copy.  Right now, it’s a low-key start.  I’m not telling you the publication date, or the book’s title or anything about its content, or, perhaps most importantly, providing a link to our Amazon ordering page..  But just you wait.  The momentum will soon start building.