Brian Byrnes on how Moneybox built a pensions and ISA empire

Brian Burns is Director of Personal Finance at Moneybox, one of the UK's biggest wealth management platforms with 23 billion under management. They've got there in no small part thanks to Brian and the team's efforts in engaging, educating, and really connecting with investors all over the country. So we're gonna learn about how he's done it, what they continue to do, the do's and don'ts, and so much more. This is Retail Investors Decoded.

I'm Carl Hazley. Brian, thank you for joining me. I have been looking forward to this for so so long because to use an old phrase, you were there shooting in the gym alongside us and others when no one was really paying attention to retail investors, no one was having the conversations they're now having. Um you've been doing the hard yards.

So delighted to have you here and to dive into it. Well, thank you very much for having me. As I say, FinMizer's been doing the hard work for a long time as well, so I'm delighted to be here. Awesome.

Um, let's go back to go forward. Before Money Box, you were in you know traditional wealth management businesses. Um why the switch? What are the biggest differences?

Maybe just talk us through your career a little. Yeah, absolutely. So I started off as a uh financial advisor uh in in high net worth uh banking. I was with uh Coots, so that was a really, really exciting and a very fun place to learn.

So great people working there and really interesting kind of customers and clients, as you can imagine. Uh, you learn a lot about uh how people think about money, regardless of uh how much wealth they they might have. You learn a lot about client service and and how to deal with individuals, which was which is great. So I did that for kind of five or six years.

I think I realized towards the end of that um that people who are already wealthy um have a lot of access to advice, right? Um there's a lot of companies out there that do a great job of servicing people with a million plus of assets. There's not a lot of people out there, there certainly weren't at the time. It's a it is better now.

Um, not a lot of people out there uh helping what I would say ordinary people with their savings, investing, pensions, uh, that side of things. So I decided to take a pivot and go more into kind of retail uh investing. Originally I was an advisor or and ran a team of financial advisors at a company called uh Welled Simple, uh, which is a massive kind of Canadian robo advisor. We set up their UK and their US offering.

One of the big features there was kind of financial advice on demand, and one of the things that that taught me was there was a huge demand in the UK for financial uh advice. People love the ability to pick up the phone and speak to a financial advisor whenever they wanted to. And then four years ago, uh I moved over to Money Box. Uh, I work with the team there on our financial education work, our guidance work, our advice work, and I also lead our public affairs and policy work.

So speaking to the government, treasury, HMRC about all things ISIS and pensions. Absolutely. We're gonna get onto some of that later on. Um, thank you for sharing.

I guess we're coming up to Moneybox's 10-year anniversary. This summer? This summer, congratulations. What do you think is the secret of Money Box's success, if you could boil it down into a couple of things?

So I think the journey that we've been on has been really interesting, right? It's been it's been 10 years. We were founded in 2016 uh by Ben and Charlie, our kind of co-founders, and the whole idea at that time was about breaking down the barriers to investing. So two of the pretty innovative features that we brought to the market at that time.

One was rounding up your spare change into investing, uh, which is pretty ubiquitous across the market now, which is which is great. And then getting started from uh investing from as little as one pound, which again wasn't really the done thing back in kind of 2016. Since then, we have grown now. We have nearly 1.

9 million customers, uh, 23 billion of assets, as you say, and that's across saving, investing, uh home buying, and retirement. And I think the thread that kind of comes through all of what we've done over the last 10 years is one, just building that trust with customers. As I say, 1.9 million customers, we're gonna add uh another 500,000 this year.

That doesn't just happen naturally. Uh, and one of the most powerful things in finance is word of mouth, and that's where we get a lot of our customers. One of the reasons that I got into financial advice was everybody has a nagging doubt in their mind about money. Yeah, like that is again quite ubiquitous across people.

People think lying in bed at night, should I be doing more with my savings? Should I be starting to invest? Am I saving enough into my pension? Um, am I going to be okay when I retire?

Everybody has a version of these uh of these money worries, regardless as say if it's a high net worth customer or coots or somebody just kind of getting started. And what Money Box has always tried to do is talk about those things rather than products, for example. So talk about the human side of money, and that has been what has served us pretty well over the last 10 years. I'm a Money Box customer.

Um I think it's great. One of the things I've noticed is just how, and you've touched on this, how the product has evolved. Even though you know the storytelling is maybe around those pain points, the product has evolved pretty dramatically. And I guess my question is, how do you take the investor with you as you do that?

I think growing with your customers is a very good way of putting it. We've built our products uh in relation to our customer base. So again, people getting started investing from as little as one pound, roundups, all that sort of stuff. Typically, that was a relatively young uh user base.

We then launched the Lifetime ISA in in 2017. Those customers would typically come to us about age 26. They would say they would say for three to five years, and then they would use their lifetime ISA to get onto uh the property ladder. So then we decided to uh start offering mortgages because again, that's what our customers were telling us that they needed at that particular time.

And that's kind of gone on and on um as our customer base has grown, as the demographics have shifted. So we offered uh Cash ISA, which those customers typically come to us about 20 years older than the Lifetime ISA. Average age of them coming into the platform is about 46. Um, then our customers were telling us that they needed help with their pensions, for example.

So we launched pension consolidation, and then very, very recently uh we've launched a uh pension drawdown service as well. So helping people with that very complex decision of how do I get money out of my pension in a tax-efficient way when I come to retire. So, as I say, it's been evolving our uh product base as our customers have kind of grown with us. I think the complexity point is really interesting because I think a couple of things have have happened over the course of the the last 10 years.

One is democratization of products has has happened. Yeah, so everything that was only available to high net worth customers in 2010, for example, most people can do on the street now. You can open up an investment account, invest into any asset class you want in probably five or ten minutes. And I think that's an absolutely brilliant thing.

Investing is no longer the preserve of the wealthy. I think the demand has also increased. Like we are seeing that from younger investors. People want to start investing uh earlier, they want to start saving.

The appetite is there for all of these products. So again, that's a positive thing. What needs to happen next, and again, this is probably the next stage in the money box kind of evolution, is helping people with the guidance, support, education, and advice to personalize the whole wealth universe, basically. So you can do all of these things, you can open up an investment account and invest in any asset class under the sun, but is that the right thing for you to do?

And again, it goes back to that nagging doubt of how do we give people, for example, personalized financial plans. It's like, no, these are the next steps for you, Carl, that will help you towards your financial goals. So I think that's the next step for Moneybugs. So let's spend a bit more time on that because your peers, your competitors are watching this, and what they might hear is we've successfully launched a product XYZ, and then we've gone and talked about it.

But you've made the point that that's not the right way to do it. It's it's more about education at the point of need, meeting the questions people have. Can you maybe share a bit about how you think about that philosophically, but also how do you get the team tactically to see that through and to not fall into the product marketing traps? I think we have always had a very consistent theme that it's not about the products and it's not even about the money.

We have a money box uh manifesto and it basically says it's about the means to more. So it's not about a lifetime ISA, it's about getting in onto the property ladder in your 20s and 30s, it's about getting the keys to your first home. It's not about a stocks and shares ISA, it's about building financial resilience and wealth for the future, it's about potentially taking a gap year in your 50s and 60s. So we have always talked to customers in a way that we feel really resonates with them.

And yes, the product stuff kind of comes underneath, but when we talk about it internally at Money Box and it permanent permeates absolutely everything that we do, it just comes it comes back to how do people naturally think about money and they don't think about it from a product first basis. So we don't talk to them about it in a product place basis. It makes perfect sense, and it sounds so simple when you say it. So let's make some enemies.

But why are people going wrong? Or what when you look out there, and again, maybe it's your competitors, maybe it's your peers, but people are going wrong here. What are they doing? Why is why are they messing this?

I think uh I can only really talk about what has worked for for us, but I think when you go back to the history of financial services, the way that products have been marketed has been a features and benefits of this is the product, this is what it does. But from our perspective, like everybody that works at Money Box, we talk about this internally. It does come back to that nagging doubt about money and just learning to talk to customers how people actually think about money and they don't think about it from a pensions perspective.

If you talk to people about pensions, you talk to people about tax relief, you will lose their interest very, very quickly, their eyes will glaze over, even though tax relief is a very, very powerful thing. If you talk to them about um uh their retirement, what they actually want to do in their 50s and 60s, and by the way, if you do these one, two, three simple things, these are the actions that you need to take, that will fulfill your dreams in retirement. This will get you to a decent kind of pension pot.

One of the biggest bugbears that I have about the financial services industry when we talk about pensions is when people come out and say, you're gonna need 850,000 pounds by the time you're 65 if you don't want to just live on uh tin food for the rest of your life. And I think that turns people off massively because 850,000 pounds, for example, is a huge amount of money. Abstract, it's a huge amount of money. Exactly.

And the the prospect of uh saving that amount of money to somebody in their 20s and 30s during a cost of living crisis is is basically it feels impossible and it will turn them off and it will switch them off. Also, the things that will help them get there, so things like tax relief, things like compound interest, time in the market, all of that sort of stuff, is not particularly easy to explain. It's full of jargon, but if you get them to do the basic things like getting your contributions right to your pensions, make sure that you're paying enough in in your 20s and 30s, you don't turn off your pension contributions, all of that stuff can work away on their background while they're getting on with life, basically.

So it's about, yeah, it's it sounds overly simple, but it is talking to people about money, the way that they think about money. It's a really good point that you made about risk. How do you see different groups of investors approaching that? So, for example, last year in 2025, 43% of new money books, stocks and shares ISA investors were Gen Z.

So that was that was great. Um, I think I saw a report from Vanguard a couple of weeks ago that said 37% of Gen Z uh people have started investing for the first time in the last two years. And every single time that we open the door to people to, for example, join a customer event, join a webinar that we're doing, ask questions, we do kind of ask me anything stuff, the demand is just off the charts. We get thousands and tens of thousands of people coming in.

And you guys must have seen it from Finamize over the last 10 years, for example, the community that that you have have built. So I think particularly for younger investors, the demand and the appetite is there. If that wasn't there, I think we'd be pushing uh water uphill, but it is clearly there. So that, as I say, gives me the hope that over the next kind of five, ten, fifteen years we can make a big difference in this country about um participation in the stock market.

That's a great segue into some of the potential catalysts for that growth over the next 10, 15 years and beyond. Government is central to that. There's recently been the pensions commission launched. Uh lots of ideas in there, potentially good and bad.

I'd love to get your initial thoughts on it. Yeah. I think um I get a bit frustrated on the pension side of things because there's some clearly um brilliant things happening in the pension space. Like, for example, auto enrollment.

Yeah, it has been an enormous win over the last 20 years, and it's not something that we talk about enough. So if you look at that interim pensions commission report, which came out a month ago, um nine in ten people who are eligible for a workplace pension are paying into a workplace pension. Auto enrollment has created 11 million new pension savers, and they are retail investors, by the way. 100%.

We we don't do a great job of connecting people with their pensions, the stock market, all of the impact that that has in terms of on an individual basis, letting them know that they are investing and also the impact that that has on the economy as well. But from a positive sense, as I say, 11 million new people are in the pensions uh environment thanks to auto enrollment. So as I say, there's been some major wins. I think that's created some problems as well.

So for example, there's 50 billion in lost pensions that people, particularly working in the gig economy, for example, uh people who change jobs quite a lot, 50 billion in lost pensions has been has been left behind. I think that's a decent problem to solve. We've got the pension dashboard finally coming next year, which will help reunite people uh with those kind of lost pension savings. So I think there's a lot of brilliant things happening uh in the pension space.

The next thing that needs to happen from a pensions perspective is coming back to that guidance, support, and advice. We can't keep telling people that they need to pay more money into their pensions. Again, we're in a cost of living uh crisis, people don't have enough money on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis. If you're telling people to up their contributions today, you're gonna lose them very, very quickly.

The other thing that we know is that if you or I sat down with anybody in the UK with their pensions and just did a few kind of sensible things in terms of helping them consolidate, making sure that they were invested in the right risk profile for their age in their 20s and 30s, make sure they were invested um suitably aggressively. Yeah, um, we could make a massive difference to their retirement outcomes without them paying another uh penny into their pensions. On balance, they'd be saving if you're consolidating, yeah, most likely.

Exactly. They'd be paying lower in fees, all that sort of stuff. So that's where we need to get to. And I think the technology is getting to a point, again, over the next five to ten years, where people will be able to get that individualized pension and retirement advice that will help them organize things, it will help them structure things without keep saying to them, you need to pay more money in, you need to pay more money in, you need to get to £800,000 in pension savings.

Um, we can help people feel more confident without asking them to put more, uh put their hand in their pocket for more pension savings. And I guess related to that, one area where people are more clearly active and aware that they are investors is the investing universe. And ICES is uh a hot topic. I have a controversial opinion on the latest ISA changes, but where are you on ICEs and the investing piece and what government can do there?

So again, it's an area where I think there's lots of positive things happening. So, for example, we have the advice guidance boundary review, which has led to targeted support, which has led to that will lead to millions more people getting more guidance, more recommendations than they have done for the last kind of 10 or 20 years, while the advice gap has grown a little bit or at worst kind of stayed static. What is it? 8.

6% of people get access to financial advice. Targeted support will help a significant number of people over the next kind of five to ten years get um suggestions for what to do with their what to do with their money, um, recommendations into investing products for the first time. So that's really good. Talked about the risk warning side of things.

Again, as an industry, we're getting away from capital at risk, the value of your money might go up and down, and talking to people in more natural language. I think the retail investing advertising campaign, whatever you want to say about the execution, um, I don't mind the squirrel. Moneybox had squirrels in the app for quite a long time, actually. So I don't I don't mind the squirrel.

But the prospect of people like the Treasury, HMRC, government, all of industry, lots of influencers, content creators, educators, all out there talking positively about investing, like that's a really, really, really good thing. Um, so I think there's lots and lots of positive things happening. I do feel like the changes that are coming to stocks and shares ISAs in April 2027, I feel like we're shooting ourselves in the foot a little bit because we are making the product that we want people to use, the stocks and shares ISA, we are making that significantly more complex.

And I just don't think that that is going to help more people take that first step into investing. So my controversial opinion is I don't think that those tax changes on stocks and shares ICEs are a big deal or will change behaviour that much. I think if you're already a stocks and shares ICE investor, then it's a bit annoying. But you're comfortable with that level of complexity and understanding that if you're in cash and TBD exactly how you know your dividends might be treated or things like that, but if you're in cash for an extended period of time, there's an incentive not to be.

Personally, I think it's gonna be detrimental because it will, as I say, confuse, add in additional complexity when we know people feel need to feel like they're confident when they're taking that first step into investing. The whole premise of these changes is that it will get more people investing. So the idea is people who were saving £20,000 into the cash ISA, for example, will now save £12,000 into the cash ISA and £8,000 into the stocks and shares ISA. Personally, I just don't think that will happen.

Um, there's lots of survey data out there to say people will just leave it in their bank account, for example, but we won't know until April 2027. So these things are supposed to be a positive change. I think you're defending them to a certain extent, but the best thing that you're saying is like I don't think they'll make any difference whatsoever whatsoever. So I do agree with you on the cash ISA limit.

I think that's detrimental short term. I think it's there's upside longer term in that if people are more comfortable in with investing at a macro level, then having less of an excuse to put money into cash ICEs should help. But I agree that's detrimental. Where I am standing on an island is on the tax changes in stocks and shares ISES.

I don't think that's as big a negative as people claim. That point on complexity, I think we're coming we're at risk of treating people with kid gloves again and saying, You don't understand that this bit of money might get taxed and that bit of it. People can wrap their heads around this. They don't want to, no one wants to spend time thinking about a tax, and the mental load is unfortunate.

But I don't think saying, Oh, no one's gonna get this and therefore they're gonna switch off is necessarily true. But but the point is we haven't had to have those conversations with people for the last 25 years. One of the major benefits of the Stocks and Shares ISA, which is an absolutely brilliant, brilliant product, you look from an international comparison perspective, there's nothing else out there like the Stocks and Shares ISA in terms of the allowance that you get and how simple that it is.

Providers like Moneybox and everybody else, for the last 25 years, when it was originally kind of PEPs and moved on to Stocks and Shares ISAs, have just been able to say, look, this is a great way for tax-free uh investing for the future. Can't say that anymore from April 2027. We have to say, oh, look, if you leave your money in cash for a period of time, you're gonna get a 22% charge. Um, don't hold too much in money market funds because then those assets will become non-qualifying.

By the way, you can't transfer out of a stocks and shares ISA into a cash ISA. So you have all of these additional restrictions that we will have to explain to customers, and none of those exist on the cash ISA product. That will remain simple, it won't have any of these restrictions whatsoever. And we're trying to encourage people to use the stocks and shares ISA while making that more complex.

That's that's just the issue from a behavioral perspective that I I really struggle with. I I yeah, I see the argument. I I hope I'm right. Um let's see, in a year, uh we'll come back here and I will owe you a pound or a pint uh if I'm wrong.

But I think the point that we've made to the government, right, on this stuff is you could take one tax year, so you could take 27, 28, you could see what people are actually doing with these uh wrappers, with the Cash ISA and the stocks and shares ISA wrapper when the 12k allowance comes in. And then you can build these measures which are coined as anti-circumvention measures. You can bring those in from April 2028 based on actual behavioural data. They're bringing in all of these rules and complexity based on things that they don't know if it's going to happen or not.

Anticipated loopholes. Exactly, anticipated loopholes. That's our view is just delay this for one year and base it on actual behavioral data. I think that's fair.

First time buyers. I think we probably Agree here, but maybe there's some work to be done on that product, on that ISA product. What do you think? Yeah, so just for a bit of context, Moneybox has the largest community of aspiring first-time bars in the UK.

Um so over the last 10 years, we have helped 200,000 people onto the property ladder, get the first keys to their home. In 2025 alone, uh, one person every 10 minutes using a Moneybox Lifetime ISA got their keys to their first home. Sometimes these figures can hide the human side of things, but these are people getting onto the property ladder, getting in, having that financial security of owning their home. That sort of thing follows you through life as well, by the way.

When you come to the pensions commission side of things, people that own their own home in retirement, their pension lasts for 13 years longer than people who are renting in retirement. So the benefit of people getting onto the property ladder in their 20s and 30s, it follows people through life and it's a massive societal advantage. From a money box perspective, most people have done that using the the Lifetime ISA, which from some circles is a much maligned product, but it is not much maligned from the people that actually use it.

The people that use the Lifetime ISA absolutely love it. From a net promoter score, which is the way that financial services kind of uh rate themselves, it is more popular as a product or a brand than John Lewis in the in in the UK. People that use it absolutely love it. Why would you not lose it when you get a thousand pounds free from the government and you get it paid monthly into your account, which is a huge kind of behavioral uh behavioral bonus?

Now, it's not perfect, and we have been campaigning for some changes on this over the last kind of three or four years. The house price cap, £450,000, that remaining static doesn't make sense to anyone. Whenever you talk to government or treasury and say, look, should it be £450,000 for the next 30 years, they say no, of course it shouldn't, but we have no mechanism right now of getting that changed. The withdrawal penalty is a bit more of an interesting one, a balanced one.

So the way that it works now, I'm sure that your listeners are familiar, if you pay into the lifetime ISA, you get a 25% bonus. If you take money out of the lifetime ISA for any reason other than for purchasing your first home or for retirement, you get a 25% penalty. But the way that that maths works is actually you lose 6.25% of your own money.

You don't just lose the government bonus, you lose a bit of your own money, which is absolutely not ideal. And again, we've been campaigning and saying, look, let's reduce that so you just lose the government bonus. On the flip side, we have customers telling us that that withdrawal penalty helps them uh be consistent with their savings. They're like, I want to put this in, I don't want to have access to it on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.

This is my long-term money. So I think that withdrawal penalty side of things is a little bit more nuanced than some of the coverage and the press would suggest. So that's where we are today. Now, the government has just launched a consultation on another new product.

So we originally had the help to buy ISA. Yes. Then we had the lifetime ISA, and now they're proposing a first-time buyer ISA. Okay.

The details in that consultation are incredibly scant. There is no details on how much you can pay in, no details on what the bonus will be. There's a suggestion that there might be a lifetime cap, and there's no detail on what the house price cap will be for that new product. The only detail that's really in there, and this is what's driving it from a government perspective, is that you won't get the bonus on a monthly basis.

You will get the bonus at the end when you come to purchase your home, which is back to where we were with the first time buy, or sorry, with the help to buy ISA. Now, our major thing, and I had to go do something called a Treasury Select Committee inquiry on Lifetime ISA a couple of years ago, which is sitting in front of 12 MPs while they grill you, which was absolutely terrifying. We made the point on the Lifetime ISA. Look, it's getting people uh onto the property ladder, it's helping people to save for retirement.

But the primary thing that we were saying was because of the monthly bonus, the lifetime ISA gets people into incredible saving and investing habits that stick with them for life. Um, so when the monthly bonus is paid out, we see people logging into the app, we see people topping up their accounts, and this is behavior that, as I say, that will stay with them. 84% of lifetime ISA savers say they have become more consistent with their saving and investing habits because of this product.

So paying the bonus at the end on the new product is throwing the baby out with the the the bath water. Um so apologies, I could rant on this for for a while, but this new product is not the solution to the minor fixes that are needed for the lifetime ISA. Cynically, you might say that the government is trying to optimize its cash flow and will shoot itself in the well, both feet and kneecaps in order to do in order to do so. We all know that there's pressure on the public finances.

Um I think there is a concern that if they did something on the house price cap or the withdrawal penalty with the existing lifetime ISA, um, that it would make it more expensive for Treasury going forward. So current expenditure on the lifetime ISA is about 600 uh million pounds a year, which to you and I is a huge amount of money. From a government perspective, that's a rounding error to their budget. And when you consider there's, I think it's like 45 billion is spent on the pensions triple lock, for example, 600 million for younger people getting onto the property ladder.

And money box research, we have proven that for every pound that the treasury spends on the lifetime ISA, they get £1.45 straight back into the coffers. Right. So for example, somebody that buys a uh first-time property in the kind of 400 to 450,000 pound region with a lifetime ISA, they typically get an average bonus of about £2,300.

They basically pay the same amount on stamp duties. Right, straight so the money comes straight back in to the Treasury. So look, there's a lot of pressure on public finances at the moment, but in terms of how we spend our money, the Lifetime ISA is incredible value for money for the government. Okay.

Let's put our soapboxes away. Um we've gone this entire conversation without mentioning AI. Yeah. And now I've done it.

Um we have fresh data that shows that 41% of investors use AI at least weekly for research and advice. I know Moneybox has dipped its toe into the AI space, you've got a new product there. Um maybe in the first instance, let's just level set everyone. Yeah.

What's Moneybox's approach to AI? How are you thinking about it? So if we talk about AI from a general purpose perspective, so any of any of these general purpose large language models, so you turn up to ChatGPT, you turn up to Cloud, whatever it might be. Turning to those services to answer personal finance or advice questions, I think there's a lot of positives to that, right?

We have had an advice gap in this country for far too long. Far too few people can get access to financial advice. There's also some really good behavioral stuff to uh those general purpose LLMs. Like you can ask a question at 11 p.

m. on a Tuesday night, sat on your couch, and get a reasonable sounding, confident, often correct answer. There's also no judgment to it whatsoever. I think there's a very interesting thing about one of the primary use cases of these uh LLM tools is also for medical questions as well.

The people are too embarrassed potentially to turn up to their doctor and ask. So they'll ask something that has no judgment, it's impersonal, all of that stuff as well. And I saw that in my experience as an advisor as well. People would turn up to those meetings really worrying about the fact that they were going to be judged about what they were doing with their finances.

And none of that exists with these products. So I think there's a lot of positives to them. I think when you talk about financial advice and personal finance, there's some drawbacks as well. There's no consumer protection whatsoever, right?

If you turn up to one of these, if you turn up to uh Chat GPT uh or Claude and you ask for something and it gives you something that looks a lot like financial advice, right? Some of them have more disclaimers uh the the than others. If something goes wrong with that, you have no protection whatsoever. And there's a lot of surveys out there that say the customers don't realize they have no protection.

They feel like they can turn up to the FCA, the financial ombudsman, whatever it might be, and these companies and say, look, I got something that looks like financial advice. It turned out to be wrong or terrible, yeah, and then no protection whatsoever. So what we as an industry need to do, and what Moneybox is trying to do, is trying to balance that off. We are trying to build AI-powered uh financial guidance and potentially financial advice in the future where customers can rely on that from Money Box and they get full full consumer protection uh as well.

And we at the back end of last year, we launched our Aurora platform, which is a human, expert-led AI-powered financial guidance platform, basically. And it will give you a personalized financial plan, step by step. Here is what you should do with your money. And as I say, it is coming from Money Box.

We are a regulated FCA entity, full consumer protection. So trying to balance off uh that playing field between, as I say, completely unregulated LLMs offering financial advice and then hopefully people turning up to Money Box for it. So just help me understand as a Money Box customer, if only a portion of my cash is in Money Box accounts, do you have a way to see across all my other investment accounts and my cash position to give that advice, or how does it work? We would be able to view what you have on the Money Box platform, and then we'd be able to ask you kind of uh further questions about what else you might have uh out there.

As I say, at the moment it is guidance, so it is financial education helping you to make your um your own decisions in a more educated and confident way. Um, I think in the future it is like like this is our first step into this world, it is likely we will look at this from a vice perspective going forwards and just give you a personal recommendation. And again, originally that will that will probably start with what you've got on the Money Box platform, but then getting more holistic uh over time.

Cool. Looking forward to that. Brian, before I let you go, one final question, which is what's the most ridiculous or entertaining story you've seen in the financial news or services space over the last few weeks? I'll go with ridiculous.

Oh, perfect. And I'll go with a theme, and it's one that really frustrates me. And it's every time you're reading in the financial press about what's going on, and there's a recurring theme of we live in incredibly uncertain times or more uncertain times than ever before. And really?

Do we? Like how how do we how do we measure that versus decades kind of come past? Like d despite my personal appearance, I wasn't actually around in the 70s. But I'd imagine inflation running at double digits, interest rates running at double digits, I'd imagine that was pretty terrifying.

You get into the 80s and you have things like Black Monday for for example, where the stock market fell off a cliff in one day. You get into dot com crisis, you get into the global financial crisis, which I was around for and I was advising and was terrifying. You then get into things like Brexit and COVID for for example. Even from a geopolitical perspective, again, going back to the 70s, I'd imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis was pretty terrifying.

But and we the thing that was different back then is how people consumed their news, right? If you consume news, you might watch the news once a day or pick up a newspaper. Currently, you you just it's 24, it's completely 24-7, absolutely live streamed on your phone, directly into your face, directly into your eyeballs. If you were trying to avoid this, you couldn't possibly do it, basically.

And we're constantly told things are more uncertain than ever, things are more volatile than ever. Whereas I just don't think that's the case. And this has real-world impact on people taking the first step into investing. Again, when we talk to our customers, uh, I think 53% of people who said they were worried about investing, it was about economic uncertainty and geopolitics, which is is valid because of how we get that rammed into our eyeballs kind of 24-7.

But you look at investment returns for the last kind of two or three years, it's been incredibly positive. Yeah. And these two things are unrelated, but it definitely doesn't help people become more confident about their personal finances, their wealth, about taking that step to invest when we're constantly told that we're living in more uncertain and more volatile times than ever. So I find that ridiculous every time I see it.

I'm I'm completely with you. I I used to have an old joke that whenever someone says, in these troubled times, I would take a shot, that's now got to evolve to unprecedented uncertainty drink by the bottle. Uh yeah, and the thing, like I I have a fairly strong belief that the way that most people should invest has has broadly speaking been been solved, right? Low cost, diversified, stay invested for the long term.

Of course, people can be more interested if they want to, they can pick individual stocks if that's something that they are passionate about. But for most people, long-term, low cost, kind of diversified. Yes. That does not fit with the world that we live in today, where it's uh all about action, all about 24-7 news, you should be doing this, you should be doing that.

And again, that's the constant battle that we we have. Um, and it's something we actively try and fight against from a money box perspective. And we say, look, investing and wealth building is a long term practice, it's a habit to get into rather than something that to react to day in, day out based on the news cycle. Brian Burns, Director of Personal Finance at Moneybox, absolute rock star.

I've loved every second of this. So thank you so much for joining Retail Investors Decoded. I've loved it as well. Thank you very much for having me.

Awesome. See you all next time.