Senior structural changes at the heads of most of the big platforms over the last calendar year have really highlighted, for me, the end of an era. From 2000 to 2010, platforms were smaller businesses and many of them were run by people with an entrepreneurial streak, spotting the next big thing and genuinely believing they had the mechanism and the opportunity to offer clients a better deal. Platforms were almost maverick – the money-sucking start-ups seen by many directors to be all hot-air and quite literally a waste of time.