Author: Aisha Mahmood

The SJP Business Sale Purchase scheme has processed up to 300 transactions per year, with a combined annual value of around £200 million, giving St. James’s Place partner firms a structured internal route to either expand or exit their practices. For wealth managers assessing their own succession planning, understanding how that mechanism operates in practice matters as much as knowing the headline numbers.A Three-Decade Framework Under Regulatory ScrutinyThe Business Sale and Purchase (BSP) proposition is not a recent invention. According to St. James’s Place, it was originally launched in 1992 and has since evolved over three decades alongside major regulatory…

HMRC tax investigation returns reached £34.70 for every £1 spent across its five key taxpayer directorates last year, according to multinational law firm Pinsent Masons, a 13% increase from £30.80 in the prior year, and a figure that underlines how seriously HM Revenue & Customs is investing in compliance activity.For anyone with significant tax affairs, whether a self-invested personal pension (SIPP) holder drawing down in retirement or a business owner with complex income streams, the direction of travel here is clear: HMRC is deploying more resource into investigations, and that resource is generating an accelerating financial return.Corporation Tax Compliance Driving…

End-of-life financial planning has, for many years, sat in an uncomfortable corner of the adviser-client relationship, avoided by both parties and deferred until circumstances made it unavoidable. That is beginning to change, and the reasons are as much personal as they are regulatory.Bill Villanova, president of Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel, has spent decades helping families navigate the most difficult moments of their lives. In a recent communication to the financial media, he described how younger generations are growing more comfortable planning for the future, and how end-of-life financial planning is evolving into an act of care rather than something…

The FCA wealth manager warnings issued this week, covering fee structures, financial crime controls and artificial intelligence risks, set the tone for a period dominated by regulatory pressure and inheritance tax planning concerns. The regulator’s review, which draws on survey data covering information up to 31 December 2024 according to Money Marketing, scrutinises an industry managing close to £1 trillion in assets and finds it making solid progress while falling short in several governance areas.For investors with SIPP or ISA holdings managed by a wealth firm, the review is a useful reminder that regulatory oversight is active, not passive. Consumer…

HMRC tax receipts 2026 reached £322.7bn in total tax and national insurance contributions between April and July, a £19.1bn increase on the same four-month period a year earlier. For investors managing wealth in drawdown or approaching retirement, the figure is more than a fiscal headline: it arrives alongside a series of legislative changes that advisers say will pull considerably more private wealth into the Treasury’s orbit. What Is Driving the Surge in HMRC Tax Receipts 2026 The rise was largely driven by robust personal and corporate taxation receipts, according to the data from HMRC. Wealth advisers, however, are looking beyond…

The European covered bond market, a €3 trillion asset class with a history stretching back more than two centuries, is attracting renewed attention from fixed-income investors who want yield without stepping meaningfully up the risk curve. Against a backdrop of geopolitical uncertainty, shifting fiscal dynamics and volatile interest-rate expectations, covered bonds present a case that is difficult to dismiss: dual recourse to the issuer and to a legally protected, over-collateralised cover pool, all within a regulatory framework that treats the asset class as highly liquid and explicitly shields it from bail-in. What Makes the European Covered Bond Market Structurally Different…

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has renewed its FCA mini-bond investor warning, cautioning consumers that unregulated loan notes and mini-bonds remain a live threat to capital, even though the regulator permanently banned the marketing of such speculative illiquid securities to retail investors in 2021. The prompt for the latest alert is the collapse of Woodville Consultants, a litigation funder that raised money from retail investors through unregulated loan notes.What the Woodville Consultants collapse revealsThe numbers behind Woodville’s failure illustrate the scale of potential loss that can hide behind an apparently functioning business. According to Crowell & Moring, the company’s latest…

The finding that trust overtakes fees when choosing wealth managers will not entirely surprise those who have spent a career in this industry, but the scale of the gap is worth examining carefully. New research from TransUnion, drawn from a study of 1,000 US consumers with at least $20,000 in investable assets, found that 65% of existing investors ranked trust and reputation among their most important factors when selecting a wealth management provider, compared with 49% who cited fees and pricing.For a profession that has spent much of the past decade defending its fee structures under the scrutiny of consumer…

Pension IHT bond demand among UK financial advisers is building ahead of the government’s planned reform that will bring unused pension funds into estates for inheritance tax purposes from April 2027, according to data published by research platform Defaqto. The figures, drawn from Defaqto’s whole-of-market adviser research platform Engage, show Prudential retaining its position as the most recommended provider in both onshore and international bond categories during the first half of 2026, while Transact climbed to second place in the international bond rankings.For advisers helping clients with estate planning, the timing matters. The government’s own impact assessment estimates that, of…