The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 25, Part 2 - Private Equity, Tech and the Future of Wealth Management
16 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best and Jonny Adams. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business.
We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development and customer success, alongside other critical elements required to build an effective growth engine for your business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way down to line managers. Welcome back to the Growth Workshop podcast with myself, Matt Best and Johnny Adams, continuing our last episode's discussion.
Fascinating insights just shared there in terms of what, and practical things that to Donald's point, if you're listening to this podcast and thinking about selling your business, things you need to consider. And clearly, um,
you know a lot of this stuff we do find out after the fact but due diligence is such an important factor in this to make sure that you're across all of that jitter you mentioned an example of where they got they had two days to do the um the technical integration and they could only possibly have done that had they done enough preparation i think that's a key thing right and a key lesson in this market but in other markets as well um like just to kind of move us into into that second thing from the report which is talking about as a result of some of these shifts that we're seeing
What are the key forces driving some of these acquisitions and who are the leading players shaping this? Donald, we've seen that accountancy-led professional services firms are perhaps looking to rebuild their financial planning capabilities. We've got a renewed PE interest, of course, and then some interest from across the pond in the US as well.
So who are those key players and how are those dynamics influencing the future of the market?
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.
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Chapter 2: What are the key forces driving acquisitions in wealth management?
But what's the exit strategy for those larger businesses as they grow their assets northwards of Europe? you know, 50 billion, because the IPO market and the opportunity to go through an IPO is challenging.
And therefore, those are likely to be done at a discount to potentially selling on to either a corporate buyer, and some of the UK banks and some of the foreign banks may actually be active there in the future, or it goes back to another turn of PE and PE consortium,
But for PE Consortium to get value for their end investors, they're then going to have to acquire and bring together larger firms as one. So it's interesting, but there will continue to be significant activity going into 2026.
Brilliant. Thank you, Donald, for that. And what does that mean for the advice? What does that mean for the advice in the market? What does that mean for arguably for the advice gap? I know we see in the US that there's perhaps less of a gap, more people receiving financial advice, more people being more financially literate.
Is that a change you think we're going to see as a result of some of these shifts? Or do you think that that's largely going to stay the same?
Well, a number of these businesses are looking at how they service their lower end clients or their clients with less investable assets. And what's the model for doing that? So a client maybe has $50,000, $100,000.
There are some firms that are investing in that in terms of how can we provide a service that is, you don't necessarily have a named advisor, but you have access to those services online, or you have a service center where you can talk to a pool of advisors. So that is definitely happening to plug that gap in the market.
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Chapter 3: Who are the leading players in the private equity landscape?
And there are other firms who are saying, actually, we're actually going to...
transfer those clients to a different provider because we're our focus is you know for our ultra high net worth client for our high net worth clients and we don't want to be in that space so you know dave i don't know if you want to comment on what you're seeing yeah i think i'm really interested to see what happens in the um for the large uh banks matt's the um
Obviously, you go back in time with RDR, a lot of the big financial institutions exited the advice market, really. It was a reputational risk and became very costly and difficult. And that kind of created the fragmentation in the first place. I think the world has moved on a lot. I think credit to it's been difficult from a regulatory aspect with consumer duty.
But actually, overall, that has improved the standard of financial service and improved the quality of advice that firms are now giving.
So I think putting all these things together in terms of who's going to have the balance sheet in deep enough pockets and the appetite to go back in to serving multiple segments, as Donald said, I think focus their reason on the banks as to how they might reenter that market.
And I think where that speaks to the advice gap is they, of course, have very large client bases at all different range of segments. I think the interesting thing for our industry now is there someone out there who can piece all of this together.
to have a very low-cost, efficient, simplified advice or targeted support on areas of the segment that don't necessarily want a face-to-face advisor and can be delivered digitally, but then all the way up to that full-service advice that in the high net worth segment people want.
I think the banks entering could be an interesting phase, and I think that will be good for the market and address that advice gap.
going to be slightly more controversial than that and say, the banks have never been good at this. They've never been very good at that crossover between banking and wealth management. They themselves will probably admit that. So yes, interesting to see if they come back into it.
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