The first time I heard about Retail Distribution Review, I was still inside Liberty. It wasn’t framed as disruption. It was framed as inevitability. RDR wasn’t about fees or titles — it was about forcing professionalism into an industry that had grown comfortable with ambiguity. What’s interesting is not that RDR arrived, but how many firms still operate as if it didn’t. The regulatory shift happened on paper. The operational shift, in many firms, never did.