The number of firms moving into Northern Ireland can help improve professionalism among financial advisers, according to a partner of Fairstone Northern Ireland (NI).
These comments come after financial planning business Tilney, Standard Life’s advice firm 1825 and wealth manager Mattioli Woods all expanded their business in the country in the last 12 months.
Fairstone NI’s Peter Savage told International Adviser: “Competition adds additional areas of professionalism. It will help people to raise their game. A bit of healthy competition always raises your standards.
“It also shines a light on Northern Ireland and makes consumers and clients more aware of what is on offer in Northern Ireland rather than a small IFA like they may have done over the last 20 years.
“There are good firms out there in terms of knowledge and resource they can offer that smaller firms may not be able to do.”
Bolstering business
Several months ago, IA asked the question whether Northern Ireland is set to become the next big wealth management hub.
Fairstone NI is hedging its bets and will look to emulate its England M&A activity in the country.
“In Northern Ireland, we are trying to expand,” said Savage. “We want to grow the business and be up there as one of the top firms in the country.
“Northern Ireland may be different to England, where there are a lot of larger firms and larger firm acquisitions. You have a couple of bigger players but generally the majority of the NI market would be smaller IFA firms.
“Given our size we see that as our opportunity both in Northern Ireland on a mini version to what we our doing in England.
“We are looking for smaller firms that have maybe run a good business for the last 25 years but have no succession planning.
“What we are looking at is to try and offer those guys a bit of a home to integrate in a view to buying them out. We are trying to do that with smaller acquisitions and organic growth.”
Improving numbers
With the number of firms looking to grow in the sector, how can Northern Ireland find the talent to bolster the industry?
There is an IFA supply issue currently in the UK and it will be hard to solve this in a small country like Northern Ireland.
Savage said: “We bring in from other firms. We have taken on four ex-banking individuals.
In terms of training, Fairstone has an academy, which has been good for them.
“They came on from a banking background to the IFA environment. They went through the academy process and two of them have attained chartered status, and the other two should get that as well soon.
“The issue within financial services is bringing new blood in. There are not as many opportunities in Northern Ireland to do that.
“You are going to look at that on a firm basis, we will be bringing in graduates through the paraplanning route.
“But even that way because of the lack of investment over the last few years, when I am looking for paraplanners it is hard to get a good one. There are opportunities to come in through paraplanning then onto advice.”
Attracting clients
Improving the numbers of financial advisers is not the only area of focus when a firm wants to grow.
Attracting clients to the business is also a top priority.
Firms are having to find different ways aside from referrals to entice clients, which has been the standard way of how IFAs gain ground in the market.
“We took on recently someone who purely marketing, and ten years you wouldn’t have got that in the IFA space,” said Savage. “Now the job is to engage as much with new clients and people to let them know what we do.
“Social media is where we our getting a lot of traction from.
“Linkedin is good with businesses but Facebook is good for individuals and we are getting a lot of interaction that way.
“We are also running educational seminars three or four times a year and making it an environment where it is no pressure to talk about topics like retirement planning. This helps get more engaged in the industry.”
Similar issues
However, finding time to spend with clients is becoming a rather hard task and this is especially the case with rise in regulation.
Savage said: “At the moment, the two biggest things are defined benefit transfer work and Mifid II. It has created extra which I am already seeing at a resource level.
“We have had to take on another paraplanner to deal with the increase time it takes to produce the necessary reports because of the additional information that is required.
“Somewhere along the line that will have a knock-on effect because it is taking more man hours to produce the same report and level of business.
“That has been challenging. When these things get introduced, there are only so many hours in the day to focus on everything.”
