Yet another busy week in UK investment platform land where the jostling for position continues unabated.

The biggest news was Aegon launching Aegon Retirement Choices (ARC), its corporate proposition which adds to the at-retirement offer launched in November 2011.

Also keeping busy were the folks over at Zurich, where it was announced they’re in the beta testing phase of launching their corporate platform via a handful of IFA firms.

Meanwhile Aviva, not wanting to feel outdone and perhaps a little perturbed by Aegon’s deal-sweetening 50% rebate for employers who use ARC between now and the end of the year, announced its platform had cracked £1 billion.

Beyond these new developments over at two of the market’s heavyweights, the announcement came that Fidelity’s David White (head of Fundsnetwork) had left the group after a decade, while Old Mutual has now decided (some feel, wrongly so) to phase out the Skandia brand on its platform.

Skandia is one of the strongest brands in UK financial services.

And who said this industry was boring?

In other news, at CoreData’s London offices we’ve been busy working on a research project looking into execution-only platforms – largely to understand whether it all just a little bit of noise or whether there is a latent demand and need for them as the market moves beyond the Retail Distribution Review (RDR).

In short, the answer is yes and no.

The size of the execution-only* market in the UK, from a pure ‘client access’ perspective, is modest in 2012 with only 1,950** advisers across the industry offering this service.

However, this is set to change with a number of advisers offering the service due to almost triple over the next two years with an approximate further 3,425** advisers scheduled to begin offering execution-only access services to clients.

According to the new CoreData Research Execution-Only Platform Study 2012, particularly interesting is that 70% of those advisers who are yet to offer execution-only services via a platform, but plan to do so, expect to make this service available to new non-advised clients.

The almost three in four advisers who expect to begin marketing their business to new clients but without any traditional ‘advice service’ to boot is very telling.

Against a backdrop of new regulatory change and compounded by the challenge of would-be client reluctance in paying a true price for advice post-RDR, it all adds up to advisers seeking new income streams.

Adding an execution-only service is not just about new sources of revenue, though, for 55% of advisers planning to add these services (13.7%) their intention is to do so as a value-add for existing clients.

A large proportion of advisers expecting to provide a transaction-only service (45%) have not yet determined how they will charge clients for access to this facility.

But three in 10 plan to bring in some type of service charge to cover the cost of access. One in five advisers plans to charge an annual flat fee.

What is notable is that almost none plan to offer this service for free.

Considering many advisers within this group aim to provide execution-only access to new, non-advice clients, it follows that they plan to charge for the service.

*Advisers who allow clients to directly transact via a platform.

**Based on an estimate of 25,000 licenced financial advisers in the United Kingdom.