Foster Denovo revenue growth extended to a ninth consecutive year in 2025, with the financial advice group reporting a 15% rise in revenue to £49.3m and a 30% increase in assets under management (AUM) to £2.2bn. The results reflect a combination of completed acquisitions, practice buy-outs and accelerating investment in technology infrastructure.
AUM expansion and the investment management build-out
The AUM figure of £2.2bn spans the group’s Dynamic Portfolios and Sequel Investments businesses. Dynamic Portfolios alone reached £1.42bn by the end of 2025, up 41% from £1bn a year earlier. That rate of AUM growth will catch the eye of advisers considering the group’s proposition, but investors and observers should note that rapid inflows into managed portfolios bring their own execution and governance demands.
According to Money Marketing, State Street, which already managed two of the group’s funds, was awarded mandates to oversee two more in October 2024. Expanding the custodian and management relationship with an institution of that scale suggests the group is building operational depth to support the portfolio range, though the commercial terms of those mandates were not disclosed.
For clients in or approaching drawdown, the question is not simply whether AUM is rising but whether the underlying portfolio architecture can sustain consistent risk-adjusted outcomes as the book scales. A 41% AUM increase in a single year is a development worth monitoring carefully over a three-to-five-year horizon.
Foster Denovo revenue growth supported by acquisitions and technology
The group completed one acquisition and three practice buy-outs during 2025. Foster Denovo is the parent of financial advice firm Foster Denovo, corporate advisory consultancy Secondsight, and investment management businesses Sequel Investments and FD Dynamic Portfolios. The results also mark four years since the group began drawing on funding from Crestline to support its acquisition strategy. Over that period, EBITDA has risen by £7.5m, from £1.6m to £9.1m.
The 2025 EBITDA figure of £9.1m came after investment in business integration and artificial intelligence (AI) automation, which will temper near-term margins. The group said it had begun working with fintech firm Palindrome to create a centralised data repository, described as a ‘data lake’, designed to support workflow automation and agentic AI applications across the business. Technology spend of this kind is speculative in the short term: the efficiency gains depend on successful integration and adoption, neither of which is straightforward in a business growing partly through acquisition.
Chief executive Roger Brosch described 2025 as ‘a solid year in which we secured the foundation for the next phase of growth, completing the integration of previous acquisitions and investing to realise the benefits AI is already delivering across our business’. He added: ‘We are now well positioned to continue to move forward; bringing together organic initiatives and further acquisitions with the scale and day-to-day efficiencies digital innovation will underpin.’
What this means for a long-term portfolio perspective
For advisers and investors assessing consolidators as part of a broader financial-services allocation, the Foster Denovo story is one of deliberate, multi-year compounding rather than a single transformative event. Ninth-year consecutive revenue growth is a pattern worth respecting, but the risks in a roll-up model are well documented: integration complexity, key-person dependency and the cost of technology that has yet to prove its return.
The group’s stated strategy remains a combination of organic growth, further acquisitions and technology investment to improve operational efficiency. With the Palindrome data-lake project now under way and the State Street mandate expansions already in place, the infrastructure decisions taken in 2024 and 2025 will be the ones that determine whether the next phase of growth holds its margin.
