Donald Reid

Yeah, so there's a lot going on and things are shifting a bit.

We actually track the number of deals across the wealth sector.

We've got our own way of doing that.

We take it from publicly available sources and we've gone back over the last six or seven years to look at the number of deals that are being reported.

And it's interesting, over the last five years, there are roughly 150 to 200 deals reported.

being announced every year.

And that in the main are deals done by PE-backed consolidators or wealth managers.

So if you look at 2025, people who are active in that sector are people like Perspective, Shackleton, Clifton Asset Management.

Those three have probably accounted for about a third of the deals that have been announced this year.

A lot of those are retiring IFAs, smaller IFA businesses that are being consolidated together.

But then we've also got...

new PE firms coming into the sector.

And there are a couple, Sovereign, Capital, August Equity, they have both acquired this year, Lee Equity Partners.

So it's interesting, Shackleton used to be owned by Sovereign.

Sovereign then went and acquired another consolidator and Lee Equity Partners came in and acquired a stake in Shackleton.

So what we're also seeing is that when PE firms look to sell and they've maybe held their portfolio investment for five, seven years, we're seeing quite a lot of those firms then reinvesting in another firm afterwards.

Why they're doing that is because they can see the benefits of investing.

And those benefits, you've got the annuity impact in terms of fees.

So there are ongoing fee levels for

ongoing financial planning advice, the ongoing fees for investment management.