Sophie Baker, South Londoner and Crystal Palace fan (funny how there are suddenly so many of them right now) is on the VFM podcast. Sophie is a journalist for a mag I’ve never read but which runs a Linked In group which I send stuff to.

“PGGM moving their portfolio” is the big story for Sophie though I wonder if more than a small percentile of the listeners to the Podcast has ever heard of PGGM where LGIM and BlackRock (passive) to a more active approach (Michelangelo 2.0). PGGM runs funds for Dutch Health Workers , a bit like running funds as a single pool for something as big (almost) as LGPS.

“Geo-politicals” and “counter-factuals” spring from this news – fresh from Nico’s thought processes and at this point we still have 55 minutes to go. Note that here we have an hour long podcast that has made it to being less than 70 minutes by 58 seconds.

Anyway this is global investment news or at least news for a trade paper and a World Pension Summit.

There is a second story to this summit is the partnerships springing up to sell institutional products to the man on the Clapham Omnibus – “instaviduals” as they are known in Sophie’s world.

Poor old Darren is being left behind in the jousting between Darren and Nico, I feel just as left out of what this has got to do with VFM. Darren brings up organisations such as Pension Bee which make life happy for ordinary people. We can instavidualise the likes of you and me through an app and Darren got told he could use a pension app in a letter he got in the post reasonably.

Frankly most people leave investment to Nico and his friends and focuses on the pensions they are going to get. League tables of investment performance are about as far away from VFM for ordinary people as you can get. We just aren’t talking about “structural reform” as value for money.

I’m not sure if this is going to be what Nico is going to be talking about at Manchester next week but I suspect that the PUK investment conference is a better place for him to go! We have some stuff on venture capital in terms of seeding a garden (some plants don’t come up).  This isn’t getting us very far and I’m 30 minutes in.

Sophie says she doesn’t do a lot of “DC UK and stuff” because failure might be desperate for ordinary people and “thinking” is not what Sophie’s editor wants her to do to keep things “big” and not meaningful to ordinary people. At this point we ground things by talking about the retailisation of institutional.

You know that you’ve got a good story where nobody comments

says Sophie, nobody comments but Darren who tells us he is going out to Amsterdam for a conference in Amsterdam (with Sophie). He will then go on a tour of large pension funds in a bus and meet posh fund managers in Holland. The good news for Australians who come here to find out about UK is that they can be introduced to Nest and other managers. The good thing about all of these is food – which is in abundance.  We have reached the half-way point learning about other countries you can go on more tours. Nico and Darren finds out there are a limited number of places coming up but they will get some (now I understand why they are doing this podcast).

Whether this has anything to do with Value for Money for the Man on the Clapham Omnibus I don’t know but I suspect that the audience is narrowing fast to the geo political strategists – most important people. Amongst all this Paul Todd of Nest is discovered talking about “deliberative democracy” – which opens whole new tours of delight from World Summit.

Nico and Darren are going to be doing VFM in Amsterdam so no doubt we can look forward to more fun. The conference plugging is then turned up to “volume 10” with reminiscences about global investment conferences that tell us how many discussions we could have enjoyed in these three people’s company. There is a lot of URL sharing as part of the “news”.

With 20 minutes to go (50 minutes in) we get to Sophie Baker’s career and how she got into journalism and hence into pension journalism (rather than law – heroically as her dad wanted her to be a lawyer). An intense discussion follows on shorthand, ( so technology is a little backfoot). At this point I had hit the prescribed 750 words for this blog so I will have to stop…yawn! I have a lot of this next week when I am a pension journalist in PUK.

You can have this self-promotion of Guy Opperman because of course self promotion is what World Pensions Conference is really about. World Pension Conference or World Pension Summit – oo – I wonder which is which or maybe they are all the same and all VFM for everyone – as long as you are male.

This blog finishes with pictures of Guy Opperman as he still holds the record of 1.46 hours on this podcast. Sophie Baker’s answer as to what pension VFM is that she doesn’t know. There is something about buying coffee but I’m off to drink some.

Perhaps the answer is Guy Opperman at a global conference.

Men at some global conference mainly featuring GO