Remind me of this in 10 years and we’ll see how many of these were close …
A lot changes in a decade – just look back to 2010, but how much of it was realistically predictable at the time? That’s hard. Imagine if in your 2009 market outlook you said “By 2019 we expect President Donald Trump will be facing impeachment as the S&P surges past 3,000, and Boris Johnson is negotiating Britain’s exit from the EU with gilt yields below 1%.” It would be the last note of your career.
Look I know forecasts are a dime a dozen this time a year but I thought it’d be fun to throw out some thoughts on what trends and themes will shape the next decade, what will surprise and what won’t.
Tl; dr: Sustainable consumerism, customer centricity and communications innovation stand out more than flashy tech breakthroughs.
For what it’s worth, I reckon that the big themes are things already in motion to some degree, we tend to underestimate how far established trends can go, and overestimate the impact of new breakthroughs. That’s my take, anyway.
How things might look in 2030- investments, work & life
1. Investment & finance
ESG (environmental, social and governance ) considerations are a massive part of what investment professionals spend their time doing, its substantially more fundamental to investment than today, but it’s not called ESG anymore
A big area of fund innovation will be Private markets funds made available on terms more aligned to investors than today’s options.
Value investing will have its day
One area we’ll see a lot of progress and much more thinking on will be individual account drawdown , we’ll look back and consider this the “dark ages”
The decade when pensions becomes a top 3 political issue around the world – of strikes and unrest over pensions as much needed systemic reforms bring to light inter-generational issues (we are seeing this already of course, but I think this has much further to go).
The most powerful and fast growing financial platforms will be consumer centric products that people love like Monzo and revolut.
2. Work
We’ll have much more remote working as video calling will finally come to the party big time with reliable, easy to use and ubiquitous apps that do offer a decent approximation of face to face meeting. Norms need to change for this too though, not just the tech.
Email will have started to die out (replaced with teams, slack, tools that actually work far better for the purpose, if you aren’t familiar, here’s why)
LinkedIn will be a powerful platform for doing business – the one social media platform that grows over the decade as the others battle a decline in users and controversies.
The biggest company in the world will be one we already know well
AI and automation will still appear to be just round the corner, but won’t have gotten any closer
3. Life
High streets reshaped into service-experience provider outlets (once a business model and rent levels settle to allow this) particularly fitness and community -based wellness
We won’t be talking about Bitcoin but we will be talking about Brexit
Uk will be averaging 60% of electricity from renewables
They won’t be any fully autonomous cars on mainstream roads in Uk – yet
We’ll stream sport (like Netflix) through “over the top” media services entertainment models that will dominate the small screen. You might say subscribe to your favourite football team or tennis player to see all their games.
Remote fitness classes are a thing
Recycling and up-cycling will really come of age, lots of day to day consumer products will based mainly or entirely on recycled
Passports will be embedded in phone
A government somewhere will have banned paper