IFA firm completes four acquisitions

Deals add 600 clients and £350m in assets under management to the group

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Perspective Financial Group has bought four IFA firms in Warrington, Sevenoaks, Burford and Bury for an undisclosed sum.

It has also made two senior hires to bolster its management team.

Prolific and Evolve

The firm has bought Prolific Financial Services in Warrington, Cheshire, opening up an additional location for the group and increasing its network of local offices to 19.

Prolific, founded in 2001 by Phil Newton and Simon Allan, has a client base of individuals and corporates across the north west

All six Prolific staff and directors have transferred across to Perspective, with Newton and Allan continuing to lead the office.

The second acquisition is Evolve Financial Management, a sole-adviser IFA based in Sevenoaks, Kent.

Founded by Mike Fisher 20 years ago, Evolve’s clients will now be served from Perspective’s existing nearby office in Maidstone with Fisher retiring.

Bowman and Quantum

The group’s third acquisition is Bowman Financial Planning in Burford, Oxfordshire which will join Perspective’s existing nearby office in Woodstock.

Founded in 1993 by Paul Catling, Bowman will see two members of staff transfer across to Perspective, while Catling and several unnamed advisers retiring later this year.

The fourth acquisition is Quantum Portfolio Management in Bury, Lancashire.

Founded by Nigel Minay and Kelvin Barlow in 2003, the firm is a specialist advice business working with recipients of substantial damages settlements resulting from catastrophic personal injury and medical negligence claims.

Perspective’s Thomas Harrison will become the lead adviser.

Collectively, these four acquisitions add 600 clients and £350m ($486m, €411m) in assets under management (AuM), giving Perspective a total of 23,000 clients and £3.6bn AuM.

Hires

In other news, Perspective has hired Fay Anderson and Stuart Groves.

Anderson joins from Intelliflo, where she held various senior client-facing roles. She now heads up implementation of the latest Intelliflo systems across Perspective’s 19 offices.

Groves joins as manager in the training and competence function to support growth in the onboarding of advice teams following acquisitions, as well as developing existing staff.

His career spans more than 20 years with Bradford & Bingley and Prudential.

‘Major strategic driver’

Ian Wilkinson, chief executive of Perspective, said: “These acquisitions and senior hires are further decisive steps in our journey to become the leading firm in the financial planning and wealth management sector for both clients and staff alike.

“We see a growing demand for the type of expert, specialised advice we offer that enables clients to make full and effective use of their financial resources, so they can plan for and achieve the futures they desire.

“Acquisitions are still a major strategic driver and as a minimum, we will complete at least the same number of deals in the second half of 2021 as we have done in the first half. These vary in size from one-man bands to larger established firms that enable us to add to our network of local offices. We remain interested in deals at both ends of the size scale.

“We are ambitious, acquisitive and growing organically. Together with CBPE Capital, who invested in us in December 2019, we are well on our way towards setting the standard for excellence in financial planning and wealth management, and therefore being the firm of choice for clients and staff alike.

“I am enormously proud of what the team has achieved over the last 13 years but am even more confident that Perspective’s best years are yet to come.”