This is where I can don my ‘been around the block, seen it all before’ mantle. What’s happening in our business/industry/profession at the moment is a lot of what’s become known as consolidation, big companies, many fuelled by private equity, buying up smaller firms or taking over the clients of retiring advisers. In theory, this is good news for the regulator, as it should be much easier to keep an eye on a few, national giants than on a population of small, local minnows. Does that improve ‘outcomes’, as they’re keen to call them, for clients, however? It can be just as easy for bad apples to hide in a big barrel and do harm before they’re found out. And the hard-selling, target driven bank financial services arms, which were pretty much allowed to get on with it in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, reinforce that big is not always, and often rarely better. I’d say.
“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.
