Donald Reid

and you can demonstrate what great value it is, and therefore it works for end clients as well, that's going to be a massive start.

Well, and the other point going hand in hand with that, make sure that you over-invest in your integration resource.

Integration resource is a massive challenge.

Make sure you've got a dedicated team.

Those firms that have a dedicated team

Based on our report, 92% of them deliver on their financial synergy case.

If you don't have a dedicated team, it's only 32%.

So overinvest and make sure you've got a really strong team to deliver your integration.

A lot of them do, but many of them don't.

And too many, there are examples of firms that do it off the side of a desk and you set yourself up for failure if you go down that route.

Yeah.

So the background to the report was about a year ago, we did a piece of work which was sponsored by SEI looking at productivity within the wealth sector.

And that highlighted a number of pain points, one of which was consolidation.

And rather than focus on that in the detail of the productivity report, we decided the topic was so big, let's do another review specifically around consolidation.

And that was the genesis of this review, which resulted in the white paper.

that was published earlier this summer.

can just add to that.

So I agree with everything that Julie's said.

But I think at the moment, organic growth is a challenge across the industry, regardless of whether you've been acquired or acquiring or whether you're operating in a steady state, because the drivers of organic growth, when a growth surges, that tends to be where you have a high level of corporate activity and you've got smaller business owners that are selling out their

seeing a windfall from selling their business and then they're looking for somewhere to invest, that really powers organic growth significantly, coupled with being recommended by clients of existing wealth managers who can then recommend their friends and the beneficiaries of those corporate deals to the right firm.