Financial advice firm consolidation dominated debate at the Money Marketing Interactive conference, held on 6 October 2026 at County Hall, London, where panellists argued that the size of a practice tells investors remarkably little about the quality of counsel they will receive.
Victoria Hicks, chief executive of Melo, opened the discussion bluntly: both the best and the worst financial advice she has encountered has come from small businesses. Greg Moss, who runs Eleven.2 Financial Planning, broadly agreed, acknowledging that ‘big can be good or bad’ before admitting, with some candour, that he ‘hated a lot of’ small firms despite owning one himself.
What financial advice firm consolidation means for client choice
For investors building portfolios or managing income in drawdown, the consolidation wave reshaping UK financial planning raises a practical question: does it narrow the range of advice available to them? Hicks conceded it does. ‘It has to,’ she said, ‘because that’s what consolidation ultimately is.’ However, she distinguished between consolidators that impose a single, compulsory investment proposition and those offering what she described as a ‘compelling, rather than compulsory’ alternative.
Her concern about vertically integrated models deserves attention from any client reviewing their planning arrangements. ‘Some businesses have absolutely rubbish funds they are trying to push their clients into,’ she said, ‘and there’s no benefit to those clients.’ The contrast she drew is relevant to anyone assessing whether their adviser’s recommended funds reflect their own interests or those of the parent group.
Moss reinforced the point from a different direction. When an adviser sells their business for what he called a ‘suspiciously high multiple’, that premium is often funded by the acquirer’s ‘very expensive’ vertically integrated product stack, into which all client assets are subsequently moved. He described this plainly as ‘obviously bad for clients’. His preferred position was unambiguous: ‘I’m definitely in favour of clients having a choice between big firms, small firms and those in between.’
Hicks argued that one of the genuine benefits consolidation can bring is homogenisation, meaning a baseline uniformity of process across acquired firms. That potential for operational consistency, she said, is part of what attracts private equity to the sector. Yet she was equally clear that acquirers who simply absorb firms and leave them unchanged have failed: ‘A couple of acquirers tried that and they died a death.’
How much choice do advice clients actually need?
Louise Jeffreys, managing director of Gunner & Co, which works with owner-managers on succession planning, challenged the assumption that more providers automatically means better outcomes. With approximately 4,500 financial planning businesses currently offering broadly similar services, she suggested the market resembles ‘a shopping mall with 4,500 shops selling jumpers’. The analogy is pointed: an abundance of providers does not guarantee meaningful differentiation.
Her deeper observation is worth sitting with. In her experience, clients form a relationship with an individual planner, regardless of the size of the firm behind that person. ‘Does the client care how many people are in the company their financial planner is employed by?’ she asked. Jeffreys also argued that even if 75% of the market were consolidated, thousands of independent firms would still remain.
For clients, the practical implication is that the regulatory framework surrounding an adviser matters as much as the firm’s size. The Financial Conduct Authority requires all regulated advisers to act in clients’ best interests, a standard that applies whether the planner works for a sprawling consolidator or a sole-principal practice. Moss noted that the genuine risks to clients tend to cluster in small firms with little or no supervision, which he described as ‘the absolute rogues who make us tear up our copies of the papers’.
Hicks, for her part, reduced the client relationship to its foundation: ‘Clients just have an expectation that if they’re working with you, you have their best interests at heart.’ That expectation sits at the centre of any portfolio review, any retirement income plan, and any decision about whether to stay with an existing adviser or look elsewhere.
