Vanguard survey

kipsterno1

I started it but about halfway through started to envy the dead and gave up.

UncleK

I may be going slightly off topic here, but I bought a laptop from Argos last year and got the request for feedback from them. It was 45 questions long! I wrote to Customer Relations saying "you must be joking" and to be fair they took it on the chin and said they would "look at ways to make it easier and quicker for customers to give their feedback". One does wonder how well these things are thought through. Having read this, I won't be doing the Vanguard survey - thanks people.

GeoffTF

Collyflower1 quoted:

We recently sent you an invitation to take part in a survey to tell us more about how you invest...

Are you happy picking your own investments? Or would you like someone to do it for you?...

We’ll use your survey answers, along with the information we already know about you, to get a complete picture of you as an investor...

I answered the questionnaire out of curiosity to see what they were asking. They did not ask me much about how I invest. They asked if I had cash, funds, ETFs or directly held shares. Nothing about directly held bonds, property (apart from my house) or anything else. Some vague questions about "other providers". Did they mean platforms or fund managers? That was not always clear.

The whole point of LifeStrategy or Target Retirement Fund is that you do not have to pick your own investments. Pay someone lots of money to decide how old you are so that you can pick the right Target Retirement Fund? That does not make much sense.

The questions were not adaptive and lacked context. There was no point point in asking me whether I took and annuity or went into drawdown, for example, when the legislation offered me no choice at the time.

OldScientist

We too gave up part of the way through the interminable Vanguard survey. It wasn't clear to me what they were actually wanting and would probably have been better off asking more targeted questions (e.g. having closed their financial advice service, perhaps they should ask whether people investing in lifestyle or target retirement funds actually need much advice). Maybe those questions came after we gave up!

Prior to retirement, I was responsible for designing surveys, and more, importantly, interpreting the outcomes. The problem with simple tick boxes is that they only potentially identify that there is a problem, but don't necessarily identify what the problem actually is.

mark_cycling00

The survey is a good example of why you should hire a market research company rather than saving a few quid by doing it yourselves.

There'll be a very unrepresentative sample who actually complete it to the end.
And the results will be fairly meaningless 

GeoffTF

mark_cycling00 said:

The survey is a good example of why you should hire a market research company rather than saving a few quid by doing it yourselves.

They hired Kantar market research.

gm0

In the aftermath of their brief entry and exit from the platform tied advice market it is not super surprising that they are surveying their customer base and looking at segmentation thereof.  Perhaps to bring some data - however flawed - to bear on the next cycle of decision making.

But this is marketing so flawed data and overly hopeful speculative analysis is a given.

If you are an ISA customer say - and have the rest of your stuff at other providers - some of us will have done that deliberately and would not be at all receptive to a consolidation play.  And if we are established DIY investors we may be advice allergic or at least uninterested in purchasing it bundled or not.  Money spent chasing us selling it is money wasted. 

You can lure us to move things with cash backs if sufficiently generous.  Clearly if you turn the incentive dial up enough - more people will take advantage of a do more stuff with us offer - at least for a while to milk it and then some of us will reset later.

There is a calculation to be done on the size of the opportunity to grow funds under management amongst people they already know and any view on how likely we are to be receptive.  Clearly the cutdown advice thing didn't work out on some combo of cost to serve and uptake.

Personally I would prefer that VG just get on with being a fund house and tax wrapper platform provider.  Do it cheap. Do it big.  Be stable.  Nothing fancy.  Care over service delivery.  Let the startups waste VC money on rapid app building and tv ads.

We can all fill it out or not to taste.

GeoffTF

gm0 said:

If you are an ISA customer say - and have the rest of your stuff at other providers - some of us will have done that deliberately and would not be at all receptive to a consolidation play.  And if we are established DIY investors we may be advice allergic or at least uninterested in purchasing it bundled or not.  Money spent chasing us selling it is money wasted. 

Personally I would prefer that VG just get on with being a fund house and tax wrapper platform provider.  Do it cheap. Do it big.  Be stable.  Nothing fancy.  Care over service delivery.

The survey aimed to find out how many of us wanted to use more than one platform or were DIY.

Vanguard's big tracker funds in the US cost very very little or nothing in some cases. That is the result of fierce competition. Vanguard's competitors typically have high margin business (e.g. managed funds and advice) to subsidise their tracker funds. Vanguard is trying to copy them. Vanguard is also keen to generate revenue in less competitive markets such as ours. I am happy to be subsidised by less savvy customers.

MEM62

TimSynths said:

I started doing it but soon lost the will to live.

Me too.  It was way too onerous for me to continue with it.  

Alexland

GeoffTF said:

Vanguard's competitors typically have high margin business (e.g. managed funds and advice) to subsidise their tracker funds. Vanguard is trying to copy them. Vanguard is also keen to generate revenue in less competitive markets such as ours. I am happy to be subsidised by less savvy customers.

It's the kind of nonsense that Jack Bogle would not approve of. Vanguard should be approaching the advice market with the objective of developing a product that genuinely benefits the customer rather than growing a cash cow.