What it looks like
Written and designed for partners and firm owners, not a slide deck in disguise.
Most of them have an accountant. This paper sets out how wide the advice gap is, why it is widening for business owners in particular, and what an accountancy firm can do about it for its own clients.
Written and designed for partners and firm owners, not a slide deck in disguise.
Every year The lang cat asks a few thousand UK adults whether they have paid for financial advice. For ten years the answer has been about one in ten, and the 2025 figure is 9%. The people who do take advice almost all say it was worth it, so the problem is not the value of advice. It is that most people never get to an adviser at all.
At the same time the adviser market is moving away from the clients an accountancy firm looks after. There are now fewer than 5,000 IFA firms in the UK, and the average new client brings a portfolio of £411,000 and is 59 years old. A 47-year-old owner-manager with most of their wealth inside the business does not fit that profile, and increasingly does not get taken on.
That leaves a large group of people who need planning, would pay for it, and have no route to it — except through someone they already trust. This paper sets out the numbers behind that, the five conversations it means are not happening, and what an accountancy firm can do about it without becoming a financial adviser.
of UK adults have paid for financial advice in the last two years. The other 91% are not getting it anywhere else (The lang cat, State of Advice Report 2025).