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.
“Letter of authority: Why now is the right time for change”
This may sound like a non-issue from outside the world-of-financial-advice bubble. It is the bain, however, of the daily working lives of many of us, particularly of those paid by we advisers to do the dirty work of dealing with the many providers with whom we have to work.
