Donald Reid

I think communication is absolutely key.

And the firms that are doing this well are those firms that have got a very clear communicated strategy in terms of what is their client segmentation?

What is their proposition?

What's their pricing model?

What's their operating model?

And if you're listening to this and you're in a firm and you're thinking of selling, if your buyer can't articulate that to you, then you are probably talking to the wrong buyer.

It is absolutely key because if you are selling and you know what's going to happen after the deal has been done and what the impact is going to be for your clients and your advisors and how they fit into the new organization...

and you know what it is, and that's something that you can sell and communicate within your firm, that is a massive advantage.

So that's how to do it well.

There are examples out there where firms are not doing it well.

And as part of our research, we identified that actually about 20% of firms have stopped

acquiring because they actually hadn't brought the businesses together that they'd acquired.

They were still running separate brands, separate propositions, separate pricing models.

That number has actually gone up to, I think, 26%.

So 26% of wealth management firms that are consolidating have had to stop

because all they've done so far is aggregate and acquire other businesses, but they haven't properly integrated.

And they're now on that integration journey.

It was quite interesting.

We spoke to a small number of firms that had been acquired as part of this research project.

There was one firm we spoke to that had been acquired by a larger consolidator, and they were very open with us.