The latest FCA Retail Mediation Report for 2025 makes for interesting if conflicting reading. It shows the retail investment sector is mostly in robust health financially except there’s a problem - the number of advisers is declining, significantly.
The number of adviser firms, for example, has fallen by 630 since 2020 to 4,872 in 2025.
The figures illustrate the impact of rapid consolidation of firms amid a waver of mergers and takeovers.
The number of advisers fell too. Between 2023 and 2025, the number of advisers fell from 37,729 to 37,517 in 2025. A fairly modest decline but part of a long term trend downwards over the last six years.
On the positive side, business was healthy with significant rises in revenue and clients. In 2020 advice firms served 3.577m clients. In 2023 this had risen to 4.034m and in 2025 it rose again to 4.158m. Financial advice firms are also seeing nearly 600,000 new clients a year turning to them for help and the number of clients ceasing to use them each year actually fell between 2024 and 2025 to 338,000 so they are retaining clients better too.
So what are we to make of all this?
Financially there is no escaping the fact the sector is - in money terms - in robust good health. Revenues and productivity are rising and many of the figures look very positive. Greater use of technology, consolidation and the arrival of large scale private equity investors is propelling the sector forward.
What is less clear is where the next generation of advisers is coming from, the ones who will move all this forward.
It seems to be almost a jobless boom taking place which is interesting in its own way but perhaps not an encouraging sign. What is not too clear from the figures is the number of support staff adviser firms employ. Logically, the only way the boom in business can be supported long term is with lots of additional support staff such as Paraplanners to serve all the extra clients.
There has been a boom in Paraplanning so perhaps while adviser job growth has been weak, the real growth in jobs has been in support staff.
Either way, the profession needs to do much more to find and recruit the next generation of Financial Planners. I attended the recent anniversary of the Personal Finance Society’s Pathway to the Profession campaign which has offered a range of incentives and scholarships to encourage new talent, with some positive success. Hundreds of young people and career changers have applied and many are already joining firms and taking courses and exams.
This is a meaningful and laudable attempt to reverse the decline in adviser numbers and I hope it continues.
No profession can prosper in the long term if its raw material, its own members, suffers an interminable decline.
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Kevin O’Donnell is editor of Financial Planning Today and a journalist with 40 years of experience in finance, business and daily news. This topical comment appears most weeks, usually on Fridays but occasionally other days. Email: