Today’s guest commentator is Bill Vasilieff, CEO of Novia. The following views are his personal views and not necessarily those of The Platforum. Thanks to Bill for his contribution.

Thanks to Holly for the opportunity – as I write I understand that there is no news yet of the new Mackay so we continue to wish her well.

Picking up on a theme from last week’s guest commentator, Paul Bradshaw of Nucleus, that ‘margins in the UK are very tight’, this week we saw further real evidence of this from two of major institutions in the UK platform market, Standard Life and Old Mutual (Skandia). In their preliminary results for 2009 both announced plans for mind boggling cost savings of £100m per annum (although in Old Mutual’s case around £45m of this is attributed to Skandia UK) reflecting the tighter margins available in the UK and the increased pressure that is expected in the run up to 2012. There is a clear link between this and Transact’s announcement last week to cut its charges, but the race is obviously on for the traditional providers to re-shape their businesses and processes, which, up until now, have been very manually intensive, to the new world of technology enabled efficiency.

This week was virtually the only week this year when Platforum did not have an announcement of some form or another regarding corporate wraps - I’m sure many readers are still reading and digesting Platforum’s white paper published last week, which I thought raised a number of interesting points and insights on the issue.

However, whilst I think, in the not too distant future, employers will offer a corporate platform that enables employees to manage all their assets including their approved pension schemes in one place, the demand from employees to take up this offer still remains unclear. As was ever the case with many financial service products and consumer take-up – they need to be ‘sold’ rather than being ‘bought’ and this challenge will remain despite technological advances.

Looking forward to 2012, we are still expecting the next paper from the FSA on the RDR this month, containing the actual rules to be implemented. Let’s hope that the inevitable lobbying that has been going on behind the scenes doesn’t result in many of the good things proposed so far being dropped.

On a lighter note I see that arch bachelor Simon Cowell is getting married – good luck to him – and we know Adam Crozier is leaving Royal Mail for the CEO post at ITV. However if the deal negotiated by the post office workers announced this week is anything to go by – Simon Cowell with his ITV hit show X Factor will be rubbing his hands and won’t be worrying about the £250,000 he reportedly spent on the engagement rock.(Now there’s an off platform asset if ever there was one!)