Talent & Growth

Building an Adviser Pipeline When You're Not a Consolidator

The FCA's 2025 data contains a quiet warning for small and mid-sized firms: the big groups are growing their own advisers. Everyone else is fishing in a shrinking pond.

Between 2023 and 2025, the number of advisers in their 30s grew by 12% — a genuinely encouraging sign for a profession whose average adviser is now in their late 40s. But look closely at where that growth came from. It came from the large firms: the consolidators with the scale to run structured "academy" programmes that bring people in and qualify them into adviser roles.

The supply problem nobody's pricing in

The implication is straightforward. The largest firms are manufacturing their own future supply of advisers. The rest of the market is left competing for a finite pool of experienced, ready-made advisers — people who are expensive, in demand, and increasingly being out-bid by the very consolidators circling the sector. As today's experienced advisers retire, the firms without a pipeline will feel the squeeze first.

You cannot scale a firm by only ever hiring fully-formed advisers. There aren't enough of them.

You don't need to be a consolidator to build one

A pipeline isn't the exclusive preserve of national groups. It's a plan, executed deliberately, on two fronts at once:

• Recruit experienced advisers strategically. Not just to fill a seat, but for capability and genuine cultural fit — the hires that strengthen the firm rather than simply adding headcount.
• Build a development layer underneath. Paraplanners and support staff with a real, mapped route into advice — your own academy, scaled to your size.

The pipeline most firms are ignoring

Here's where the FCA data turns from warning into opportunity. Women make up around 18% of financial advisers — yet they account for 48% of paraplanners and 66% of support staff. The profession is full of qualified, capable people in the support layer, and remarkably few are making the step up into advice.

That isn't a statistic to file under diversity reporting and forget. It's a capacity strategy hiding in plain sight. The firms with academies are already acting on it — representation among advisers under 50 is roughly double that of the over-50s. The people who could fill your future adviser gap may already be sitting in your paraplanning team, or in someone else's, waiting for a firm that will back them.

Capacity comes before clients

If you're planning to grow, the temptation is to chase demand first. But under Consumer Duty you can only serve as many clients as your people can properly look after. The binding constraint on growth is capacity, not leads. So the real question isn't "where are the clients?" — it's "who's going to look after them, and have I started hiring yet?" The firms that scale well answer that question first.

Source: FCA Financial Advice Firms Survey 2025, published 23 April 2026.