Interesting curation of Blacktower Financial Management news

Recently, the Financial Conduct Authority released its Financial Lives Survey 2017, which suggests that many savers lack understanding of how their pensions work. The survey gathered responses from just under 13,000 UK consumers and aimed to gain an insight into their experiences of retail financial products and services.

The FCA was concerned by some of the responses to its survey because they illustrated a distinct lack of knowledge among savers. For instance, around 13% of UK adults did not know whether they were paying into a defined benefit pension or a defined contribution pension.

There is no doubt that ecommerce is one of the most exciting investment sectors that exists today. Every aspect of our lives is affected by ecommerce. It is fast, high profile, and the numbers are breathtaking:

• Amazon processed nearly $89 billion in sales from 240 million customers;
• Visa and MasterCard have over 1,600 million credit cards in circulation;
• Apple and Google are now worth more than many entire countries.

Amazing as those number are, they pale into insignificance when you consider that the total ecommerce market was estimated to be $1.6 trillion in 2015. However, 20 years ago it didn’t exist, but it is forecast to grow to $3.5 trillion per annum by 2019.