Technology alone will not solve advisers’ capacity and profitability challenges, authors argue
Most advice firms aren’t failing. But they are running out of road. That’s according to a new white paper published today by Jigsaw Tree, The Flower Group, Plannr and Seccl which argues that the model that built the UK financial advice profession is now the thing holding it back. However, the solution isn’t adding in more people, more software, or bolting on AI. It’s a fundamental rethink of how advice firms are architected.
The report, entitled ‘Advisory Growth Blueprint: Bolting new tech to a 1980s engine won’t get you to 2030’, combines original research from the Financial Adviser Survey 2026 across the UK market with a practical, phased, transformation roadmap. It is not another paper about the potential of technology. It gives firms a step-by-step framework to act on.
The numbers make the cost of inaction concrete. The paper presents the evidence how an average ten-adviser firm wastes £360,000 a year on qualified professional time spent on work that doesn’t require a qualified professional. Nearly a third of advisers surveyed said they couldn’t absorb 50 new clients today. Seven percent are already turning clients away.
The culprit isn’t a lack of ambition or investment. It’s architecture.
The average advice firm operates across five to ten disconnected systems; CRM, cashflow software, investment platforms, compliance spreadsheets with each chosen carefully, each genuinely useful, and collectively creating an integration problem that costs hours per person, per week. FCA RMAR data shows the consequence clearly: while a typical 60/40 portfolio grew by over 30% in five years, average revenue per adviser increased by just 12%. Strip out market growth, and real revenue per adviser is shrinking.
The Blueprint
The paper sets out three transformation scenarios; keep hiring, transform operations, or deploy full technology and outsourcing leverage and models the economics of each across a representative £100m AUM firm over three years. The difference in cumulative profit between the traditional path and the leverage path is up to £1.5 million. By year five, technology-enabled firms are projecting net margins of 55–72% against 36–42% for firms that continue as they are.
| KEY FINDINGS |
- The capacity ceiling isn’t a people problem, it’s a systems problem, and it’s getting more expensive every year
- 29% of advisers could not absorb 50 new clients; 7% are already turning clients away
- 40–60% of adviser time is consumed by administration that doesn’t need a qualified professional; equivalent to £360,000 wasted annually in a ten-adviser firm
- 66% of advisers are spending less than half their working week on work that justifies their fees
- By 2030, the market will divide into two types of firm: those that transformed their operating model and those that didn’t
| WHAT THE SPONSORS SAY |
| “In a market where revenue per adviser is falling in real terms, the firms that command the best multiples aren’t just profitable; they’re scalable. Growth and architecture must be in the same conversation. Don’t run your advice firm through a rear-view mirror. A CFO doesn’t just watch the P&L; they interrogate it. Which clients are actually profitable? Which advisers are at capacity? Where is revenue leaking? When principals start asking those questions with the right data behind them, growth stops being accidental.” Gordon Flower, Founder, The Flower Group |
| “We have mapped processes inside more than 400 advice firms. What firms think takes three days actually takes seven when you count every email, every login, every handoff, every wait state. Client onboarding isn’t a three-day process interrupted by delays. It’s a seven-day process with four days of invisible waste baked into the model. The extra four days aren’t bad luck. They’re the cost of a business built by accumulation rather than design. That’s what process mapping makes undeniable and it’s what this blueprint shows firms how to fix.” Chris Baigent-Reed, Founder, Jigsaw Tree |
| “Much of the technology that drives our market is losing its relevance: scarcely automated, poorly architected and badly connected. The result is clunky manual processes, poor data flow, slow transfers – and advisers spending far too much time compensating for systems that should be doing more of the work. When the architecture is right, admin starts to drop away and firms can grow without simply adding more people, more process and more cost. And it is becoming easier and easier to come by – whether directly through API-first infrastructure, or indirectly through the modern platforms already built on top of it.” David Ferguson, Executive Chairman, Seccl |
| “Legacy systems weren’t designed to be added to at the pace of change modern advice firms require. The architecture question isn’t which CRM to buy; it’s whether your system records what your business has already done, or changes how your business works. Plannr was built as an open, API-first operating system precisely because tracking activity after the fact isn’t transformation. Tasks that previously required 15–20 minutes of platform interaction now take 60–90 seconds when the operating system is doing its job. That’s not a marginal gain. That’s what architecture-level change actually feels like.” Gareth Thompson, Chief Technical Architect, Plannr |
| The Advisory Growth Blueprint is free to download now at: https://www.theflowergroup.co.uk/advisory-growth-white-paper/ |
