Professional personal
We are supported and majority owned by Independent Wealth Planners, a group, which enables us to grow and develop as a business.
Expert financial planning for the road ahead…
IWP aims to build Britain’s best national IFA businesses. But they don’t intend to start from scratch; they think there’s no need because there are already many excellent financial planning firms such as ours up and down the country.
What IWP do is invest in firms like ours, acquiring either all the equity or a major stake, and then grow them, by providing infrastructure and support services, achieving organic growth and also growing them through further acquisition. They merge local firms together to create regional scale, and in doing that they work on the assumption that the staff and offices they acquire are all valuable.
They don’t have any predetermined objective of reducing costs, because their strategy is simply to invest in growth by acquiring great firms like ours. Of course, there will be operational change for us, to ensure that we serve clients as efficiently and effectively as possible, but any such change is driven by a desire to improve the way we work for clients, not to save cost. They make a substantial investment in our operating systems, to ensure that our business can give the best possible service to our clients.
Run by local people, for the people
They provide centralised services such as compliance, marketing, financial support, HR administration and recruitment. Unlike a traditional “consolidator”, they don’t control the businesses they buy: They maintain them as local businesses and as they think that we, as local management, are the best people to run local firms for the benefit of their clients.
Complete and clear advice from the best
For this reason, each IWP member firm like ours is run by its local board of directors and their principal businesses remain directly authorised firms with the Financial Conduct Authority. They support us closely in implementing our business plans and meeting our regulatory obligations, but they are very much a shareholder and provider of services, not a “head office”.