Giving clients a full choice of the best available products and services is always a challenge, even more so when the Financial Conduct Authority expects whole of market advisers to be able to offer everything that is available to retail investors, including Enterprise Investments and other specialist and higher risk investments. Most advisers are generalist, each with perhaps a few high net worth clients with specialist planning requirements, who are most likely to benefit from such schemes. This means that the average adviser is unlikely to be highly active in this field, and therefore short of the necessary knowledge to work effectively within it. If we go back some years, a typical approach was to get brochures from a small number of well-known companies and try to make sense of them. This is not a process that will satisfy most compliance officers today. It was also very difficult for less well-known fund managers to make much impression in the market as they lacked the presence of an established name. More comprehensive reports have always been available, but only on individual products, leaving advisers to narrow down their choices. The problem is magnified by the need to have a range of investments in a portfolio to avoid a concentration of risk. It was hard enough to research one product for selection, let alone eight or ten. As a first step, what was needed was a way in which advisers could carry out research in a systematic and repeatable way. In recent years, we have seen the emergence of research platforms such as MICAP, which gives an overview of what is available across the market, combined with more detailed reporting. This allows proper filtering and the creation of short lists. However, this does not necessarily produce the deeper kind of due diligence that allows advisers to assess the nature of underlying investments, the credibility of those managing them and the true nature of the risks involved. This extra layer is also now available. Finally, there is the logistical problem of transacting business, ideally as digital as possible, such as ready access to reports, valuations and tax certificates. As in other areas of investment management, the emergence of platforms has facilitated this. We should not ignore the growth in a shared culture of knowledge, encouraged by industry publications, research houses and adviser peer groups. The New Opus website is intended to promote much better knowledge sharing between advisers across the industry, and with product providers and fund managers.