Bristol based discretionary fund manager (DFM) Whitechurch Securities is looking take on a small number of appointed representatives as part of a new adviser partnership.
The firm has launched a "partnership programme", which will offer advisers the opportunity to become ARs, or to sell their firm should they wish to retire.
Advisers can also opt to outsource to Whitechurch and gain access to resources such as paraplanning, research and compliance assistance.
Despite the AR positions, the new proposition is not a network in the regulatory sense as it will not meet the size requirements set by the regulator. Whitechurch plans to take on no more than four AR firms, it said.
Whitechurch had sold its adviser network to On-line Partnership Group in 2012 and was rebranded to In Partnership in 2014.
Whitechurch has also been buying up advice firms selectively for the past decade but is keen to distance itself from other consolidators in the market, which, it said, "simply want to hoover up a client bank".
Ian McIver, head of partnership proposition at Whitechurch, said: "We appreciate the challenges that advisers face in managing their clients and the understandable concerns they may have about what happens to those clients when they exit the profession. I’ve always referred to this as an emotional sale."
He added: "A lot of the time, when advisers decide to retire, they decide pretty quickly they want to do it, and they wish they had aligned themselves earlier.
"Outsourcing is popular in the industry, and if an adviser becomes an appointed representative, and are also using our discretionary service, then it makes the eventual retirement easier to manage for the adviser and their clients."
Francis Klonowski, who runs Klonowski and Co in Leeds, said being part of a support group made sense for small IFAs for whom it was often not practical to do the investment management and financial planning all in house.
Mr Klonowski said he outsources about 95 per cent of the investment management to fund of funds and discretionary managers, and has done so since 1995.
He added outsourcing compliance meant he had more time to focus on financial planning.
This article has been revised since its original publication to clarify that Whitechurch is not in the process of launching a network as defined by the Financial Conduct Authority.
david.thorpe@ft.com
