Our Top 100 Financial Advisers list always makes for fascinating reading and gives a great snapshot of how do excel in this industry.
This year, many of the top 10 financial advice firms, continued to snap up businesses and increase their headcounts.
But just increasing the number of advisers in your ranks is no way to increase gross sales – the only way to top our annual list.
What is key, according to all of the names that have risen to the pinnacle of the Top 100 list, is making sure advisers can spend more time in front of their clients ensuring investment plans can deliver the lifestyle they want.
Many of the firms on the list have invested in training their advisers to make sure they are ready to cope with the financial challenges – pension freedoms and defined benefit transfers – that are thrown their way.
It is interesting to note that Hargreaves Lansdown, which remained in second place to St James’s Place, ditched plans for a robo-advice service this year and instead focussed on tools that enable clients to do an element of self-servicing.
Brewin Dolphin, which is in fifth place, is also looking at making sure clients can get access to their portfolios, annual statements and quarterly statements as easily as possible acknowledging “these things need to be continually upgraded and improved.”
Indeed – love or loathe – the businesses at the top of our Top 100 Financial Advisers list you can’t deny one of the key things that has boosted their bottom lines this year has been investing in people and technology to make their clients' lives easier.
As Philip Martin, marketing director of Openwork, which is in fourth place this year, so succinctly puts it: “The market is very strong; quite simply there are too few advisers to service the needs of the market.
“It is a great time to be an adviser.”
emma.hughes@ft.com
