The Oscars represent the pinnacle of self-satisfied awards ceremonies. As such, they’re often best remembered for those occasions when participants don’t completely buy into the prevailing air of mutual back-slapping.

Take Patty Duke. In 1963, having scooped the Best Supporting Actress award for The Miracle Worker, she struck a resounding blow for succinctness and humility by confining her acceptance speech to two words: 'Thank you'.

Amusingly, some winners don’t even bother to turn up. Woody Allen preferred to honour a standing engagement to play jazz clarinet at a New York bar. Marlon Brando famously sent a Native American Indian in his stead. George C Scott not only stayed away but flat-out refused the Best Actor award for 1971’s Patton, condemning the whole caboodle as 'a two-hour meat parade'.

I was reminded of these and other noteworthy efforts when Novia Global was recently crowned International Platform of the Year in the 2025 Investment International Awards. How might I mark our latest triumph in suitably memorable style?

On balance, since I’m not a fan of full-blown controversy, I reckon Patty Duke was on the right track. She was happy to accept the acclaim but kept things short and sweet – which is very much what I would do if someone were to ask me why I believe Novia Global took the prize.

The point here is that the way in which providers choose to frame a platform’s appeal – rather like most of the monologues at the Oscars – is nowadays often overlong, overcomplicated and overwhelming. There’s an unfortunate tendency to rattle on and on about stuff that people neither need nor want to hear.

This can result in a damaging failure to 'articulate the proposition', as marketing folks say. An excessive focus on baffling details, gratuitous complexities, whizz-bang features and what have you usually leads only to confusion and strictly limited interest.

In tandem, there seems to be a bizarre conviction that target audiences already totally understand a platform’s fundamental attractions and that to dwell on these would therefore be not just unnecessary but downright stupid. In my experience, this thinking is both misguided and counterproductive.

Bearing all of the above in mind, I would sum up the winning ways of Novia Global – and any other truly efficient and effective platform, for that matter – not in two words but in three easy steps.

1. Simplicity

In some shape or form, electronic trading has been available to consumers for at least four decades. By one or two rules of thumb, it might even be said to have existed for more than half a century.

Needless to say, plenty has changed in that time. Online investing was undeniably exciting during its formative years, but a dizzying assortment of providers and portals meant it could also be perplexing and heavily resource-intensive.

Platforms have played a pivotal role in ending that challenging and slightly untamed era. One of their principal functions is to allow investors to hold and access a range of assets and accounts in the same place – and, if required, under the same management and advice. Innovative but proven technology is key to the simple, seamless investment journeys that are now possible.

2. Trust

Ideally, a platform looks after clients’ money, grows it and then gives it back. This might sound a trifle unsophisticated, but it’s really an accurate encapsulation of the long-term process that investors seek in every kind of financial services provider.

Naturally, any such relationship must be founded on trust. Investors are rightly averse to hidden commission, jaw-dropping exit penalties, incomprehensible terms and conditions, illiquid assets and other unwelcome surprises. This is why the best platforms are highly transparent.

By meeting a raft of regulatory requirements – across multiple jurisdictions in Novia Global’s case – platforms foster both clarity and confidence. They bring a measure of certainty to the inherently uncertain task of accumulating and preserving wealth.

3. Value

Historically, the act of engaging with financial services providers has frequently been viewed as unduly expensive. The adviser community in particular knows this problem only too well.

Platforms have helped shatter longstanding perceptions of a broader industry routinely dismissed as costly, exclusive or even pointless. They represent a compelling example of giving consumers what they need – and, indeed, what they should expect – which is a low-cost means of benefiting from the wider world of investment.

Together, the two attributes discussed previously – simplicity and trust – should translate into value, especially when institutional buying power is taken into account. Platforms can now open up a tremendous array of opportunities that were once well beyond the reach of most investors, underlining the genuinely game-changing power of this type of investment vehicle.

Steve Andrews is CEO of Novia Global