Headline figures, there were over 200,000 financial advisers at the end of the ’90s, there are around 30,000 now and our numbers are continuing to reduce. The two biggest cliff-edge falls came after the financial crash, when the banks were suddenly and actually regulated and they post-haste closed down their advice operations; and the FCA’s ‘Retail Distribution Review’ in 2013, which both required advisers of many years’ experience and standing to take a raft of exams to stay in business, and banned commission. This most recent decrease, a big proportion of those remaining in percentage terms, is a result of ‘consolidation’, big firms paying over-the-odds to buy smaller fry and soak-up their clients; and of yet more complex FCA regulation, their shiny new ‘Consumer Duty’, which has led still more of those smaller fry, whose services are, I would say, highly valued, to wonder if life is not too short for all this. We’ve decided that it, hopefully, isn’t; and we, hopefully, won’t be proven wrong.
“FCA: ‘We’re not against small firms’”
We’ve always been a small firm, even when we thought we were big, as the official classification is ‘ten advisers or less’. There is a, perhaps justifiable perception that our regulator would prefer to regulate far fewer big firms, rather than the many thousands of smaller adviser companies which are still in the vast majority, with over 88% of the 4,600 odd directly-authorised financial advisers comprising less than 5 advisers.
