A large City based IFA practice approached Periscope in January 2021. The firm built its business largely by acquisition and over the 25 years accumulated over £700M of AUM across thousands of clients. A complete overhaul of the business in 2021 and 2022 was undertaken which identified that their 30 advisers were generating over 75% of the income from their top 30% of clients.

It made no business sense at all to continue like this and the firm had already approached one of the national firms with a view to buying their smaller clients but that contract did not appeal to them.

The team at Periscope worked closely with the Directors and advisers over the next 9 months to help them identify which clients were “smaller”. A challenge in itself given that a small client for a senior adviser might actually be a larger client for a newly qualified adviser.

Nonetheless, after 9 months the Firm had identified the smaller, less profitable clients of the 30 advisers and the AUM amounted to just over £200M.

Periscope was tasked with helping the Firm approach each of the smaller clients to discuss their existing servicing and fee arrangements and to then provide 2 alternatives – to pay a higher ongoing AMC with the Firm, or to move to another IFA at the same cost or lower with the added benefit of a far superior on-going service proposition.

At the time of writing we have approached half of the smaller clients (£100M of AUM) and over 75% have now moved to a new company which has generated £3,000,000 in fees for the City based IFA.