Matt Best

And Gillian, Donald, co-authors of the Consolidation in Wealth Management report.

So we're thrilled to be unpacking that with you.

I wonder if it might be helpful for the audience, Donald, maybe just to give us a bit of insight into how the report was crafted, what your objectives were for the report before we get started.

Fantastic.

And obviously at Solve, Donald, part of how you help your clients through a combination of services around advisory, M&A, of course, is a big part of the conversation today, transformation change, and then more in the sort of vendor and technology side as well around systems of vendor selection.

product and proposition.

So you've got a wealth of experience in your team, in wealth management, and in how you help your clients.

And obviously, we're going to unpack that a little bit more today.

So some of those key notes that we want to hit from the report that particularly stood out for Johnny and I as we were going through it were

you know, why M&A kills organic growth potentially.

And that's quite a dramatic statement, of course, which we can dive into in a little bit more detail.

But thinking about AUM as being one of the core reasons, AUM growth as under management growth being one of the core reasons why mergers or why merger and acquisition is in this market.

We're then going to unpack a little bit about, you know, who's buying in this space, right?

So private equity, some of the US advisory firms eyeing up some of that

some of the uk sector for expansion um and then some of the changes that have happened in the in that space over recent over recent months and years and then the final topic that we're going to get into today is around technology and technology is at the forefront of everyone's thoughts at the moment with the with ai really kind of taking taking a hold over lots of markets how does that impact wealth management how can that help but also maybe isn't helping at the

across some of this merger and acquisition activity.

So that's what we'd love to get into today.

And if I could maybe start with that first theme.

So, Gilly, I'm going to come to you as we think about some of the consolidation reports findings when it comes to M&A activity and actually how that's significantly constraining organic growth.

So in your view, why does organic growth become such a challenge during consolidation?