Beyond the Portfolio (Part 2): What Dispersion Tells You About Platform Pricing

In our last post, we walked through how mathematics and statistics can support better decisions, using platform pricing as the example.

If I have one critique of the platform research I've seen over the years — paid and unpaid, and of financial planning research generally — it's the lack of descriptive statistics used to draw real inferences. You're lucky to get a sum, a count, or an average.

The slide below gives you a bit more to work with: count, average, and median too. But today, we're focusing on dispersion — standard deviation.

Dispersion tells you how spread out platform pricing actually is across the market at a given AUM level. A high number means providers are pricing very differently from one another. A low number means the market has effectively converged — most platforms charging within a narrow band of each other.

Here's what our research found, using a sample of 36 UK platforms across the typical IFA client AUM range.

Note: the data is real, but a few years old now — treat it as illustrative rather than current.

At £20k AUM, dispersion is high (0.24) — platform pricing varies significantly, and choosing the wrong one genuinely costs a client money. By £100k, dispersion has dropped to 0.07. From £150k right through to £2m, it settles into a tight band between 0.05 and 0.07, only widening slightly again at £5m — and even then, it stays low.

For the AUM range most IFA clients actually sit in — roughly £100k to £2m — platform pricing has already converged. The market has done the work of narrowing pricing for you.

That's the practical takeaway: at the AUM levels most advisers deal with day to day, obsessing over platform price differences delivers diminishing returns. The bigger lever for client outcomes sits elsewhere — portfolio construction, advice quality, the ongoing relationship, and fund and advice fees.

Dispersion data is what lets you say that with evidence, not opinion.

Glyn Chetwynd

Founder & Analyst|

*Personal views. Educational content; not investment advice or an offer of any security or fund interest. Any results shown are illustrative. Past or hypothetical results do not guarantee future results.