Private equity has been quietly buying up UK financial advice firms. Many of those buyers also own the funds your adviser recommends. Here’s what that means for your money.

The message from your financial adviser sounds routine. The firm has been taken over by a larger group. Same people, better backing, nothing to worry about. Most clients nod along and carry on.

Think instead about what happens when a GP surgery is bought by a private healthcare chain that also manufactures its own medicines. The doctor is still your doctor, same face, same consulting room. But the chain that now signs the payroll also profits when you’re prescribed its own branded products. The prescriptions may not change. The incentives, though, have shifted in ways you can’t see from the waiting room.

That same pattern has been playing out across UK financial advice, at speed and largely out of sight.

Has your adviser been taken over?

According to the NextWealth Consolidator and Aggregator Report 2025, 127 acquisition deals were announced in 2024. The number of advice firms fell by 8.1% in 2023 alone, and around half of all UK advisers now work in firms with more than 50 advisers.

What’s changed most sharply is who is doing the buying. Approximately 72% of deals in the first half of 2025 reportedly involved private equity, almost double the prior year’s share. These aren’t patient, long-term owners. Private equity firms typically invest with a five-to-seven-year exit horizon, which means the business needs to generate returns quickly enough to repay debt and reward investors before the next sale.

In June 2025, Lee Equity Partners, a US private equity firm, took a majority stake in Shackleton, a UK consolidator managing around £7bn in client assets. In February 2026, NatWest announced the acquisition of Evelyn Partners, bringing roughly £67bn in assets under management into the banking group. The ownership chains now stretch further and further from the client sitting across the desk.

What your adviser may not have mentioned

According to the NextWealth report, 84% of profiled consolidators run their own in-house Model Portfolio Services, and 68% have their own fund range. The firm that bought your adviser almost certainly has its own products to sell.

This is what the industry calls vertical integration: the same group owns the advice, the platform, and the investment product, capturing margin at every stage. It creates an incentive that didn’t exist when your adviser ran an independent practice, one pointing towards the group’s own products regardless of whether they’re the best option for you.

According to the SPIVA Europe Mid-Year 2025 Scorecard, 97% of sterling-denominated Global Equity funds underperformed their benchmark over the ten years to June 2025. That’s not a bad year or an unlucky run. It’s a decade of evidence. If your adviser is being nudged towards the parent company’s actively managed funds, history suggests those funds are more likely to cost you money than make you it.

The FCA confirmed the conflict isn’t theoretical. Its October 2025 multi-firm review found that “some groups offered explicit or implicit incentives to invest in group products or services, including investment products.”

The regulator’s verdict

In October 2024, the FCA wrote to advisers and intermediaries flagging consolidation as a specific concern and warning that debt-funded acquisitions needed credible, stress-tested repayment plans. A year later came the follow-through.

On 31 October 2025, the FCA published its multi-firm review of the sector. The findings were pointed. On debt: funding equity investments through debt “can weaken the financial resilience of regulated entities.” On conflicts: vertically integrated groups must “properly identify and manage the inherent conflicts.” The review also criticised firms for absorbing client books without properly examining past advice quality, potentially inheriting liabilities they hadn’t accounted for.

As of early 2026, the FCA has not issued a Final Notice against a major consolidator for post-Consumer Duty breaches. It’s still in the review-and-warn phase. The burden of staying informed falls on you.

When debt meets your savings

Acquiring advice firms costs money, and most of it is borrowed. Deal multiples have roughly doubled since 2021, from around 3–6 times EBITDA to as high as 6–12 times in recent transactions. Parts of the sector are already showing strain. True Potential reported a £243m operating loss in 2024, refinanced approximately £750m of debt, and set aside around £100m for client redress following an FCA Section 166 review.

Client investment assets are held separately from the advice firm’s balance sheet and carry regulatory protections. But a parent under financial pressure has less capacity to invest in service quality and, as the FCA noted, a structural temptation to move cash from the regulated business to meet group-level debt. The risk isn’t that your adviser’s firm disappears overnight. It’s that service slowly deteriorates, and you don’t notice until it matters.

Three questions worth asking now

First: who owns this firm, and who owns them? The FCA Financial Services Register lets you trace any firm’s ownership structure. If the chain leads to a private equity fund with no obvious UK presence, ask your adviser to explain who ultimately owns the business and what their investment horizon looks like. Vagueness is informative.

Second: are my investments in your parent company’s own funds? If yes, ask for written justification of why those funds represent better value than a comparable low-cost index alternative. Consumer Duty requires them to demonstrate fair value, and given that 97% of active global equity funds lag their benchmarks over a decade, it’s a reasonable question to push.

Third: has anything changed in how you’re paid since the acquisition? If your adviser now earns more for recommending in-house products than external ones, that’s a conflict worth understanding before acting on their next recommendation. Get any post-acquisition changes confirmed in writing.

If you’re uncomfortable with what you find, genuinely independent advisers do still exist. The Personal Finance Society directory and Unbiased are reasonable starting points. The FCA Register confirms whether an adviser operates on a fully independent or restricted basis.

The pharmacy may be stocked with house brands. The group may have borrowed heavily to buy the building. That knowledge doesn’t make you a cynic. It makes you an informed client, which is exactly what your adviser’s new owners are hoping you won’t be.

Firms structured differently do exist. Y TREE is one. No in-house products, no vertically integrated revenue chain, no private equity owner with a five-year exit clock. The entire business model rests on the advice being genuinely independent.

Robin Powell is an author, journalist and financial consumer advocate. He is also the editor of The Evidence-Based Investor.

If you’re wondering whether the conflicts described in this article actually show up in client returns, Y TREE has done the work.

Their 2026 Plugged Into Wealth Management report analysed more than 550 real portfolios across 110 providers, including many of the vertically integrated firms now consolidating the advice market.

The finding: 84% of wealth managers underperformed a simple passive benchmark.

The very structure this article describes isn’t just a theoretical risk. It’s already costing clients money.

You can read Robin’s analysis of the report here: https://shorturl.at/mE4MJ