Welcome to the latest installment of FTAdviser's Top 100 Financial Advisers 2021, our annual rankings detailing some of the best advisory firms from across the UK.
We’ll be counting down 20 firms a day from now until the end of the week, culminating in the publication of the full list this Friday (November 12).
This year, we've done away with a numbered ranking system for all but the top 20 firms.
Businesses outside this group are now listed in alphabetical order. We’ve done this so the list emphasises the companies themselves, rather than giving undue focus to a precise position in the rankings, or how that position might have shifted year-on-year.
Equally, we consider it important to retain a small group of firms that our metrics rank as the best of the best at the top of the list.
The Top 100 is again compiled using data provided by London-based Financial Clarity, an arm of ISS Market Intelligence, and those statistics continue to form the backbone of our rankings.
The one notable change to these calculations for 2021 is that we’ve again increased the focus on companies who are either chartered by the CII or accredited by the CISI.
These standards aren’t a guarantee of good behaviour or good practices. But they remain a decent indication of a firm trying to do the right thing by its customers, and ensure our list isn’t compiled using financial metrics alone.
In short, they help make our rankings a more useful snapshot of the UK financial advice industry.
A directory of all firms chartered by the CII can be found here, while those accredited by the CISI can be found here.
Full details of how the Top 100 has been calculated will be published later this week. Yesterday's initial batch of 20 companies can be found here, and the second set of companies are as follows:
| Douglas Steers & Co |
| Edison Wealth Management |
| Ellis Bates |
| Emery (IFA) |
| Equilibrium Financial Planning |
| Fairstone |
| Fidelius |
| Financial Advice & Services |
| Foster Denovo |
| Gale & Phillipson |
| Handelsbanken Wealth & Asset Management |
| Hargreaves Lansdown |
| HFMC Wealth |
| Howard Wright |
| Hoyl |
| HSBC |
| Hugh Davies Associates |
| InPartnership |
| Johnston Campbell |
| Kerr Henderson |
What the list measures
In addition to the increased emphasis on chartered or accredited company status, our rankings retain metrics used in previous years.
That means we also look at the growth rate of advisory businesses, AUM and asset retention, and the number of years’ experience each business has managing assets in different economic and interest-rate environments.
In order to check how advisers are managing their clients’ investments, Financial Clarity used data received directly from fund managers covering the vast majority of the retail investment market, plus 14 of the nation’s biggest investment platforms. In most cases, that means advice companies’ own platforms are not included.
As a result, the Top 100 Financial Advisers list incorporates not a company’s stated level of AUM, but rather the amount held on those 14 investment platforms and with most of the nation’s biggest fund houses. They include assets in retail advisory investments and pensions, reported to Financial Clarity. On top of this, firms are only included if they had £150m of gross sales or more over the 12-month period. The likes of DFM assets are not included unless submitted to ISS as such.
