The tyrant’s downfall
If megalomania is the extremity of myopia then Shelley’s great epitaph to tyranny is the logical conclusion of this blog
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Jonathan Bull – a retiring gentleman
Last night I had the great pleasure of shaking the hand of Jonathan Bull, a gentleman of the City who , for nigh on forty years has worked for Thomas Miller, the Lloyds brokers. As Jonathan pointed out, he has had three careers with the firm, firstly as a marine broker, then as a risk manager in social housing and latterly as the CEO of the Occupational Pension Defence Union, this last role being the one I know him for.
Jonathan moved with the times and reinvented himself thrice. Now he will reinvent himself a fourth time as a retired person. I’m sure he’ll be as good at that as he has been in his last three jobs.
Tim Jones – a gentlemen entrepreneur
At Jonathan’s reception was Tim Jones, someone who is also moving on from being CEO of NEST to being a whizzy tech person. He demonstrated to a bemused Jon Stapleton and me, apps that conjured money from the interweb and dispersed it to other mobile phones with the flick of Tim’s dextrous fingers.
The technology he is bringing to market will work with Fiat currencies not the imaginary stuff he was working with last night. Tim is shrewd enough to see that mobile telephony enables us to be our own banks and for personal verification to rest with the finger, the retina and even the gait of the owner of the phone.
As pension administrators struggle to pay claims in a fortnight and demand countersigned copies of birth , death and marriage certificates before signing cheques, Tim’s technology will simply walk past, like the man with the magical passport walking past the airport queue.
Lesley Titcomb – a radical regulator
The myopia of our pension industry is caused by us having it very good for a very long-time, to the point that we would like nothing to change – ever. But things are changing; Lesley Titcomb of tPR sees the staging of the 1m employers who’ve never had a pension as her biggest challenge, we don’t even have a DB regulator at the moment!
George Osborne spoke recently of making financial services part of the solution (not part of the problem), the bank-bashing Martin Wheatley has left the FCA, there is a new air of can do about the place.
Everywhere there is change, tax- regulatory focus – customers. The myopia of the pensions industry is they see nothing to change.
What do Bull, Jones and Titcomb have in common? They all know how to move on!