By Steve Conley, Academy of Life Planning, Author of “Your Money or Your Life: Unmask the highway robbers – enjoy wealth in every area of your life.”
12 November 2025
When Britain’s largest wealth manager, St. James’s Place (SJP), says it’s moving toward evidence-based investing, the financial press applauds.
When Robin Powell — one of the UK’s most respected advocates for low-cost, evidence-led investing — praises that shift, the industry takes notice.
And yet, behind the headlines lies a more uncomfortable truth.
SJP’s pivot isn’t reform. It’s reputation management.
It’s not evidence-based planning.
It’s profit-based posturing.
And it perfectly illustrates the difference between structural trustworthiness and structural exploitation.
The PR Spin: “From Active to Evidence-Based”
Powell’s recent article, “When SJP Shifts, the Industry Takes Notice”, highlights a cultural sea change at SJP.
He reports that under new leadership — with Justin Onuekwusi as Chief Investment Officer and Joe Wiggins as Director of Research — SJP is finally embracing index-based investing through its new Polaris Multi-Index range.
At first glance, this looks revolutionary:
- Tactical market timing is out.
- Long-term discipline is in.
- Behavioural finance takes centre stage.
It’s a message designed to inspire confidence and admiration.
But look deeper — and you find the same old machinery humming beneath a fresh coat of ethical paint.
The Hidden Mechanics: Same Costs, New Cosmetics
Two weeks ago, I wrote an article titled:
“💰 Over 99% of What the Investor Pays Never Reaches the People Managing the Money.”
That figure remains the most telling statistic in this debate.
SJP’s new tracker funds are operated by State Street — one of the world’s most efficient institutional asset managers — at an eye-watering low cost of 0.0075%.
That’s around £75 per £1 million invested.
But clients aren’t paying 0.0075%.
They’re paying around 1.3% per year in total costs once all the layers are added up.
| Layer | Who Gets Paid | Charge (% p.a.) |
|---|---|---|
| Underlying Tracker Fund | State Street | 0.0075% |
| Polaris Fund Wrapper | State Street + SJP | 0.20% |
| Fund Management Margin | SJP | ~0.17% |
| Platform Fee | SJP | 0.27–0.35% |
| Advice Fee | SJP | 0.80% (0.25% retained) |
| Total to Investor | ≈ 1.3% |
That means that over 99% of every pound clients pay remains inside SJP’s distribution system — not with the professionals managing the assets.
The much-heralded “shift to passive” simply means that much of the savings from cheaper fund manufacturing have been redirected — not to clients, but to intermediaries.
In some cases, the ongoing advice charge has increased, from 0.5% to 0.8%.
This is not cost reduction.
This is margin migration disguised as progress.
Behavioural Finance as Retention Strategy
Powell rightly applauds the integration of behavioural finance into SJP’s investment framework — the focus on discipline, patience, and sticking with a long-term plan.
On the surface, this sounds enlightened.
In practice, it functions as a psychological moat.
When clients are told, “Don’t react, don’t question, stay the course,” the same mantra that encourages good investing behaviour also discourages critical examination of fees and structure.
The message becomes:
“Your job is to trust us — not test us.”
True behavioural empowerment teaches clients how to think, not what to think.
SJP’s approach leans toward the latter.
It keeps investors calm, compliant, and conveniently captured.
The Language of Reform — Co-opted
Powell’s enthusiasm reflects an understandable hope — that SJP’s size could normalise evidence-based practices across the industry.
And in fairness, he’s right about this:
“When SJP moves, it redefines what ‘normal’ looks like.”
But that’s exactly why this matters.
When exploitative structures adopt the language of empowerment, they don’t democratise the system — they inoculate it against change.
They take the rhetoric of trustworthiness and use it to reinforce dependency.
This is not evolution.
It’s adaptation.
The wolf has swapped its designer suit for a lab coat labelled “evidence-based.”
The Structural Lens: SUD vs. STP
At the Academy of Life Planning, we measure systems not by intent or image, but by structure.
We use two diagnostic lenses:
| Structurally Untrustworthy Discount (SUD) | Structurally Trustworthy Premium (STP) | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Transparency | Appears cheap through clever packaging | Is genuinely low, openly itemised |
| Value Flow | Opaque; captured by intermediaries | Transparent; value flows to client |
| Behavioural Narrative | “Trust us and stay invested” | “Understand, question, and decide” |
| Relationship | Dependency-based | Empowerment-based |
| Moral Basis | Extraction | Reciprocity |
SJP’s “evidence-based” structure remains SUD in disguise.
The data may be passive — but the design is still predatory.
A Structurally Trustworthy Premium, by contrast, doesn’t just lower costs — it re-engineers the flow of value:
- Advice is separate from product.
- Transparency is the default.
- Clients own their plan, not just their portfolio.
That’s the model we build at the Academy.
Why This Moment Matters
SJP’s shift is not irrelevant — it’s instructive.
It shows that the evidence-based revolution is winning rhetorically, even if not ethically.
Incumbents now feel obliged to sound like reformers — which means the moral ground has moved.
But until their structures change, we are still in the Age of Exploitation, not the Age of Empowerment.
The real challenge ahead is this:
Can evidence-based investing exist inside a structurally untrustworthy system?
Or does it require a completely new architecture of transparency, accountability, and agency?
That’s the question the Academy of Life Planning was founded to answer.
From Discounts to Premiums: The Future of Financial Planning
The future doesn’t belong to those who charge less — it belongs to those who serve more openly.
We call this transition the move from Structurally Untrustworthy Discounts (SUD) to the Structurally Trustworthy Premium (STP).
It’s not about passive funds or active funds.
It’s about where your money goes, who benefits, and whether the system empowers or exploits.
Until 100% of value serves the client’s plan — not the institution’s profit — “evidence-based investing” remains a slogan, not a solution.
The Moral Question
If 99% of your investment cost never reaches the people managing your money,
what exactly are you paying for?
Brand comfort?
Dependence?
Illusion of advice?
Or are you unknowingly financing the very structure that keeps you disempowered?
At the Academy of Life Planning, we believe it’s time to end that illusion — and reclaim the full value of your wealth, wisdom, and will.
The Takeaway
Robin Powell is right that the world should take notice when SJP shifts.
But we must take notice for the right reasons.
The revolution we need isn’t a cosmetic one.
It’s structural.
And it starts when we stop confusing reputation with reform.
Steve Conley
Founder, The Academy of Life Planning
Empowering People. Elevating Planners. Transforming Systems.
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Academy of Life Planning 
You are being unfair.
1.3% is broken down:
0.2% multi-asset funds-of-index-funds
0.8% ongoing advice
0.3% platform, tax wrappers and product
All individually transparent, competitively priced and collectively compare well to the market for the combined regulated service
The ongoing advice component can be turned off if it’s not wanted.
I think you’re being overly cynical and critical. But am aware that is your default style.
Hi Sarah, thanks for taking the time to comment.
I’m not questioning the arithmetic of the 1.3% split — I’m questioning the architecture.
In this model, roughly 99% of the ongoing fee goes to the intermediary, and 1% goes to the actual investment manager. That tells us something important:
the value is not in the investment process — it is in the distribution.
And when a product is built so that distribution captures almost the entire economic benefit, it reflects an intermediation-first, client-second structure. That is the concern.
Even if each component is “transparent” and “competitively priced” in isolation, the combined effect is still an extraction-based model.
Clients are paying mainly for access rather than outcomes.
As for turning off the advice fee — yes, in theory.
But culturally and operationally, that almost never happens, and the pressure to keep the fee running remains high.
My work isn’t about cynicism; it’s about structural trustworthiness.
If 56% of the public now use AI for financial guidance, it’s because people are looking for transparent, product-free planning — not intermediation-dependent fee structures.
I appreciate you engaging in the discussion — this debate is exactly what the industry needs.