Adviser Consolidation and Risk Profiling

Notes on the opportunity to improve compliance and align practices

The UK financial advice market continues to evolve, with a flow of mergers, acquisitions and new entrants. Consolidators – both established players and those new to the market – are reshaping the adviser landscape. Their goals often include improved operational efficiency, consistent client outcomes and compliance process consistency across firms which join their business or network. Achieving this at scale is no small task, especially in areas with heightened regulatory scrutiny, such as customer risk profiling.

Under the FCA’s Consumer Duty and COBS rules, firms must ensure advice is suitable, deliver good outcomes, and keep a robust record of the reasoning behind recommendations. This requires a consistent and defensible approach to assessing each client’s attitude to risk, capacity for loss, and investment objectives. For consolidators, this means replacing inherited variations in questionnaires, scoring methods, and interpretation with a single, standardised approach. Without this, it is possible for clients with similar risk profiles having portfolios with very different risk-return characteristics.  Not only does this add to operational complexity, it would be difficult to justify to the regulator.

The flipside is that consolidators have the opportunity to improve industry standards in areas such as risk profiling.

A2Risk provides risk profiling solutions designed with these challenges in mind. Our ready-to-integrate questionnaires can be deployed across an adviser network and white-labelled for a consistent client experience.

Flexibility – from adjusting the number of risk categories to tailoring question wording – enables consolidators to create a coherent, group-wide process without losing the ability to adapt to specific client segments. For firms with significant retiree client bases, our established decumulation questionnaire offers a robust framework for assessing drawdown-specific risks in line with regulatory requirements. A2Risk also offers risk profiling in markets outside the UK.

For both new and established consolidators, standardising risk profiling is more than a compliance exercise – it is a foundation for scalable, high-quality advice. Implementing a well-tested, consistent framework early in the integration process reduces operational strain, strengthens the audit trail and ensures clients receive advice based on shared, transparent principles.

As consolidation activity continues – and new entrants seek to establish their operating models – getting risk profiling right from the outset can demonstrate regulatory compliance, improve client trust and support long-term business performance. While it may be just the first step in the advice process, risk profiling sets the tone for the quality and consistency of client relationships across the group.