CSR, or I should say, the perception of CSR has improved dramatically over the past few years as is emerging reinforced as a mainstream management approach to improve profitability, not just the naive marketing lead and ultimately superficial initiatives that gave the ethos a bad name.

The arrival of the internet was key in an earlier step change in CSR’s evolution by suddenly making available additional information about corporate activity to those who went looking for it. Social media is providing another step change for CSR as this information is now being pushed at everybody online, every minute of the day. It’s fun watching traditional PR departments failing miserably to manage a crisis unfolding in real time via Twitter etc without the ability to hide behind the control that press releases and traditional paper based journalism gave them.

A new era of transparency? Maybe. A new era of enlightened media management? Definitely.

Anybody need a CSR training course for media professionals?? I know a man that can help

The RDR will change the adviser demographic.

I took my Diploma exams last ..the other people taking them were younger & there were many more women than you normally see amongst groupings of IFAs.

The RDR is basically to make financial services more professional…eg better trained advisers with higher qualifications not just insecure sales people obsessed with cars.

When Civil partnerships came in, I went to see the leader of a gay organisation in Swindon to have a chat about financial planning & civil partnerships.

He pointed out there would be fewer civil partnerships than expected because gay men enjoyed the single lifestyle…

I think it is an issue that warrants further discussion, particularly around the subject of access to independent financial advice for all, free of prejudice or ‘conservatism’ – not least now that Civil Parnerships, to my understanding, rightly confer the same spousal transfer of assets rights to same sex married couples that heterosexual married couples enjoy. I would have thought that this area of tax planning and provision of life assurance to safeguard partners (irrespective of whether there are children) would be a burgeoning area for advisers in this context…

Do you think that IFA demographic is genuinely a hurdle? And if so, how do you overcome it?

When we’ve talked about Critical Illness, myself & clients have studied the policy small print about HIV/AIDS. It has not stopped them taking up the protection

In society in general people are not as conscious of death & disease as in the past. People live longer and survive cancer & heart disease. People do not feel as “mortal” as in the past when everybody died younger and did not survive the critical illnesses.

Usually gay & lesbian people do not have children. Protection is often sold on the basis that it will help look after the children.

Another reason that might explain why protection is less common in the gay community is that the majority of Financial Advisers are 50+, male & rather conservative…