What up, TCWU fam. It’s Rich Mayor here, filling in for Mark as he scampers around England’s green and pleasant lands. A happy new year to you, if that’s not too late to say (lol, rofl, lmao, “this is great banter”.gif). I spent most of the Christmas break in a very retro fashion with a bout of Covid, but I am fine now. And that’s you all caught up.
During the brief time in fevered stasis, it appears the world did not stop but instead continued at the ridiculous and relentless pace we saw in 2025. Doomscrolling is somehow even more full of doom than it was before, and just when you think “that’s quite enough doom, thank you very much”, another serving of full fat doom is dolloped on your plate.
Best to venture into the rolling hills of platform land then. We’re collecting the data for Q4 and while I’m fully expecting to see more of what we saw in Q3, namely nice gross sales and climbing outflows, we’ll wait and see whether that’s actually true.
Something that’s been at the front of my mind when it comes to the platform market is the shape of advice firms and the rise and rise again of the consolidator market. During Q3 we were treated to the FCA’s late publication of the advice firm stats, aka Mike Barrett’s favourite day of the year. These showed a continuation of familiar trends: plateaued numbers of advisers, plateaued numbers of advised clients, and falling numbers of firms with five advisers or fewer.
While the rather useful database provided by New Model Adviser showed advice firm acquisitions slowed quite a bit during 2025, we’re now at a point where some firms can make very big changes to platform gross sales and AUM if they change their panel.
For the most part, advised platform sales trends have broadly reflected market conditions and client needs. Historically, few platforms completely buck a wider trend, whether that’s increased new business, record outflows, or whatever new legislative Thing is happening. Rising tides float all boats, and they sink together too.
That’s not been the case so much in recent years. We’ve seen long established new business records smashed repeatedly in a market where client numbers have remained steady. We’ve seen flows that look as spiky as those you’d expect when a new scheme is won in the workplace or institutional channels. For my money, that’s what the advised platform market is becoming, along with being absolutely massive in terms of AUM. We’re approaching the point where market growth of existing assets over the past ten years will outstrip growth from net sales.
If things continue as they have, the transfer of power from provider to IFA that was so key to platform success over their life company predecessors is going to become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the largest firms. In the here and now, we can see that reflected in platform development. Much of it has focused on reducing friction in long running problem areas like integrations between platforms and the rest of the advice tech framework. That benefits everyone else too, so long as they share at least some of the same tech stack.
Platforms are also, quite logically, putting more effort into making it easier to move larger books of business. That’s been true for a while, but there’s now extra impetus for traditional platform models given the rise of Model B propositions, where huge swathes of business can move very quickly.
The underlying Big Thing in all of this is that the market, both advice and platforms, needs New Blood. Logic, and plenty of research including our own, suggests that new potential clients via Targeted Support and Simplified Advice are most likely to be served by the largest firms. They have the resources to experiment and deliver at scale. We don’t yet see much appetite for this among smaller advice firms. Bolder ideas are required, so I’ll end with a seamless plug for our New Blood event, where we’ll dig into exactly that sort of stuff.
And finally, music choice for you is the snappily-titled Hope Is a Butterfly, No Net Its Captor, She Beats Her Wings and Softly Sings of Summer Scent and Children’s Laughter… (Virus of Silence), by one of my favourite ever bands, the time-signature-bending RX Bandits.
