I always enjoy the month of August – not only do I get to celebrate my birthday (I’m not telling you how old I am) but it is also marks the start of the new English Football League season.

I’m a bitter Arsenal fan who typically gets to see other clubs spend £40-50m pounds on a player or players while we sign an unknown 12-year old from France who has never kicked a football but has “unlimited potential”.

But things have changed this year – there’s talk of Arsenal spending £70m to £100m on players as the financial might of the club continues to grow.

The truth is that it is the same everywhere else as a new television deal worth £3bn a year for the Premier League means the 20 teams at the top table continue to splash the cash to succeed.

There tends to be a rule that most businesses follow and that is that if the demand is there the money will follow and in football’s case, with millionaire owners and billion pound TV deals, it is as strong as ever.

But there are exceptions and the UK investment platform market unfortunately is one of them.

Here is an industry that has grown phenomenally in size since 2000 as advisers recognise the need to imbed these platforms into their business model.

The market has gone from a handful of players to a raft of firms all looking to a get a slice of the platform pie.

That slice is assets under management; the trouble is, the more an adviser uses a platform the less money they want to pay for it.

According to CoreData’s 2013 investment platform report – almost a third of advisers cited costs, fees and charging structures as the main factor that would encourage them to select a platform.

In terms of adviser satisfaction with their main platform provider, the study finds that a combination of online transaction functionality (31%), reliability and security of the technology (23.1%) and ease of re-registering assets on and off the platform (21.8%) accounted for three quarters of the overall statistical drivers of adviser satisfaction they use.

The message appears simple, while service matters to advisers once they get in the door – cost is what opens it.

So what are we seeing as a result – a very big race to the bottom.

We have already seen some platforms pull out of the market as it continues to mature and compete primarily on price.

Platforms face the conundrum of having a smaller cash stream from advisers/fund managers compounded by a need to invest more in services, without the latter they will simply creak and fall over as human error becomes more apparent.

Something has to give. Perhaps talk of consolidation in the platform market will finally come to fruition.