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At our recent Global Investment Conference in London, I chaired a panel with two people who sit at very different vantage points in UK wealth management: Doug Abbott, Chief Product Officer at Hargreaves Lansdown, and Mark Fitzpatrick, CEO of St. James's Place. Between them, they touched on almost every issue running through advice today: who owns it, who regulates it, who gets it, and who's still missing out. What follows is my account of that conversation.
Private equity, dealmaking and the scale game
Private equity was the first theme to surface, and Doug – whose own firm was recently taken private – was quick to push back on how the industry talks about it. "Quite often we talk about private equity generically as if it is an asset class, but actually it is not," he said. "It is a bunch of skilled and talented managers who have a philosophy on how you might use private capital to give a return to people." For Hargreaves Lansdown, he argued, being out of public markets has been liberating rather than constraining: "You can focus on doing a great job for clients. You can create a great company."
Mark's take was more circumspect. Private equity, he said, is drawn to wealth management "looking for a return for their investors without a shadow of a doubt" – and not every deal in the sector has yet delivered the platforming and efficiency gains that were promised. He sees plenty more dealmaking of this kind still to come.
Both agreed that scale is becoming close to unavoidable. Mark was direct about where that leaves the standalone advisor: the regulatory and technology burden of running a small practice alone is rising fast, and clients now expect the kind of speed and continuity that only bigger, better-resourced businesses can offer. "I think it is going to become a scale game," he said. "It is a bit like the big banks – they are still fiercely competitive but there are very few small, little banks these days." Underneath that is a less discussed problem: the profession simply isn't bringing through enough new advisors to replace those approaching retirement, which will only sharpen the scale dynamic further.
Trust, regulation and making advice accessible
The number that anchored this part of the conversation was one I found genuinely striking: only around 9% of people in the UK currently take financial advice. Both panellists agreed that's not a market-share problem to fight over – it's a growth opportunity the whole industry should be chasing.
Mark partly attributed the UK's weak savings and investment culture to a highly regulated, risk-averse environment – where an ISA or basic unit trust can require a series of warnings before someone can invest, while something like crypto requires barely one. "It is no wonder we have such a huge savings and investment gap in the UK," he said. Mark also pointed to a cultural factor: people in the UK don't talk about money the way they do elsewhere – and he believes normalising that conversation is part of closing the gap.
Doug felt product proliferation and design was a problem in its own right. "If you started from scratch for our industry, you wouldn't create a bunch of products that nobody understands with weird names..." – and would instead design everything around what clients are actually trying to achieve.
Both pointed to trust as central to the relationship with clients, if not quite in the same way. "What we provide is trust," Mark said. "If that breaks, you are done." Doug made a related point: good advice, he said, "gives them trust. It creates great feelings of confidence and security." Both were candid, too, that shifting rules – on pensions, tax and beyond – have worn away some of that confidence over time. Mark added a sharper example: speculation ahead of budget events, he said, tends to make clients act prematurely, sometimes withdrawing tax-free cash before they should – causing damage to their pension that can't be undone. Where they landed together was on the need for something simpler for the ordinary saver: Doug pointed to more room for investor education and guidance, Mark to simple products at an accessible price point, with firms being upfront about what's guidance and what's advice.
The shape of future portfolios
Doug described a shift, playing out over the past 10 to 15 years, away from a fragmented, product-led approach towards centralised model portfolios. "This has been a good thing for outcomes for investors," he said, "more professionally managed portfolios, more consistency of outcomes, more portfolios matched to people's risks and financial plans" – even as the pricing pressure that comes with it has forced every part of the value chain to sharpen up.
Mark expects private markets to be a feature of some portfolios over time but was careful to temper expectations about how quickly that could happen. "The illiquidity factor is a feature of private markets," he said. "It is not a bug to be fixed – it is a feature." He referred to problems already emerging in the US, where clients have tried to sue providers over money they couldn't access, despite prospectuses spelling out the illiquidity terms clearly. His point wasn't that private markets are unsuitable – it's that they're not right for every client, and that anyone allocating to them needs to understand the trade-off going in. On tokenisation, his view was measured: useful at the margins for private markets, but not a fix for the underlying liquidity question. Mark also pointed to something harder to quantify: reading the "mood music" in the market, and being thoughtful rather than first-to-market – "having a new toy today" isn't enough if it doesn't serve the client well over time.
The human side: advisors, women in the profession and generational wealth transfer
An audience question returned the panel to a theme Mark had already touched on: women in financial planning. Mark was open that the profession has a long way to go – women remain a minority of UK financial planners. But he pointed to genuine progress: a growing share of women coming through St. James's Place's own advisor training programme, and a peer group set up specifically to rethink how the profession supports women coming into it. He also referenced research the firm has carried out. It found that many younger women would value the option of working with a woman advisor – having that choice available to them.
Intergenerational wealth transfer ran through several parts of the discussion. Mark's central point was that advisors who only build a relationship with one member of a couple or family are taking an unnecessary risk: when a client dies and the surviving partner or the next generation has no relationship with the advisor, the assets very often move elsewhere. Doug agreed, describing what Hargreaves Lansdown calls "moments that matter" – those moments in a client's life such as bereavement, retirement, gifting and inheritance, where getting the experience right either cements a relationship for the next generation or loses it for good. He also pointed to something more structural: a shift toward linking family accounts so households can manage their wealth from one place rather than several – a direction that chimes with how we think about supporting families with more complex, multi-generational needs.
Technology and AI
I turned the conversation to AI, a topic Doug joked comes up on every panel now. His view was that the clearest near-term use case is operational: transforming the middle office and digital front end of a platform business, doing more with fewer people, and doing it faster than seemed possible even a year ago. Beyond efficiency, he sees real potential in employing technology to reach far more clients than advice alone currently does. Targeted support – part of an emerging regulatory framework – would enable firms to offer help to clients without stepping over into full advice: nudging people, for example, toward better decisions on cash or retirement planning.
Closing thought
Toward the end of the session, I asked what one lesson advisors outside the UK might take from our experience here. Doug's answer wasn't about products, portfolios, or technology at all: "Managing portfolios when you are not a professional fund manager, doing things that you think add value and you can tell the client about are not the routes to success. It is financial advice, trust, giving people plans, delivering great outcomes." Everything else we discussed – private capital, consolidation, portfolio innovation, AI – is, in the end, in service of that. The UK wealth management industry is being reshaped from several directions at once. The firms that keep sight of that one idea are the ones best positioned for the growth still sitting in front of us.
