The ‘Big Bang’ of the 1980s had far-reaching consequences. Rules, many unwritten traditions involving all sorts of handshakes which had held together the City and our financial system for possibly a couple of hundred years, were binned in the name of Thatcherite, free-market progress. Suddenly, you could become a merchant banker without having been to public school and banks could own stockbrokers and insurance companies. Anyone could become a dealer in all sorts of things no-one had previously heard of, fortunes were made, then lost, when it all came home to roost in 2009. And here, it seems, we go again, with a post-Brexit Big Bang 2. To paraphrase the late, great George Micheal, what have we learned from all this pain? Very little, I suspect.
“Britain has lost 435 financial advice firms since 2022”
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.