InMarketing Today

St James's Place, the UK's largest wealth manager, reported net inflows slowing to £2.7bn from £3.8bn after two advisory firms, Prospera Wealth Management and Wellesley Investment Management, left its network as partners — with a third, Sovereign Wealth, reportedly weighing the same move. Profit before tax nearly doubled to £968.2m, funds under management reached a record £240.8bn, and the adviser base grew to 4,951.

SJP's model runs on advisers who put their own name and client relationships behind the firm's brand. When an advisory firm defects, it takes years of trust with it — trust that SJP never fully owned in the first place. Any distribution model built on someone else's relationship capital is rented, not owned, and growing profit doesn't offset a shrinking claim on your own customer relationships.

Track adviser retention and advocacy as closely as inflows; it is the leading indicator, not the lagging one. Invest directly in the parts of the client relationship the firm actually controls — its own brand, its direct channels, its own content — so that when an adviser leaves, some of the trust stays with the house rather than walking out with them.

BNY, custodian of more than $59tn in assets, is moving its transfer agency business — the system that processes trades and keeps ownership records — onto the blockchain. Baillie Gifford is already using it for the first "fully native" UK-regulated tokenised fund, with BlackRock and Dreyfus expected to follow. Franklin Templeton chief executive Jenny Johnson said the current alternative costs firms "a tonne of money reconciling data between systems."

Every executive quoted makes the same pitch: one shared, verifiable record beats several competing ones. That is a communications problem as much as a technical one. Most of financial services still runs on the assumption that each party keeps its own version of events and reconciles later. A single source of truth is not just an operational upgrade — it is a different promise to make to clients and regulators, and it needs a different story told around it.

If your firm is moving toward shared-ledger infrastructure, do not leave the story confined to operations and technology teams. Brief communications and marketing now on what "single source of truth" actually means for client trust. The phrase will get used regardless — make sure it means something specific when it does.

Researchers at GPTZero found four PwC Middle East reports on AI and electric vehicles riddled with fabricated and broken citations: links to pages that do not contain the claimed evidence, an academic paper that appears to have been invented entirely, and a teenage blogger with 280 followers cited as the source for a JPMorgan case study. PwC said it is "updating a limited number of supporting citations." EY and KPMG have already retracted similar AI-generated reports after earlier GPTZero investigations.

These reports existed to win consulting work by demonstrating expertise. Instead they demonstrated the opposite: nobody at the firm checked the citations before publishing content meant to reassure clients that PwC could be trusted to help them use AI responsibly. That is exactly the credibility a professional services brand cannot afford to spend carelessly — thought leadership is only leadership if the thinking is actually there.

Before publishing anything AI-assisted under your firm's name, have a named human verify every citation against its original source, not just its plausibility. If that step is not happening today, add it now. Being the fourth Big Four firm caught this way costs more than the time it would have taken to check.