Most partners weigh up an introducer partnership as a question about clients: would ours benefit, and would they thank us for it. That is a fair question and it usually gets a fair answer. It is also the smaller half of the decision.
The larger half is what the arrangement does to the firm — whether it makes good clients harder to lose, what it changes about a year-end meeting, and whether it earns its place in a practice that is already busy enough. This article takes the practice side of the argument seriously, including the parts of it that do not flatter the idea.
Good clients almost never leave over the accounts
Owner-managed clients rarely move firms because a set of accounts was late or a computation was wrong. Those things cause complaints, not departures. Departures happen when somebody else quietly becomes the professional the owner phones first — and by the time the disengagement letter arrives, that shift happened eighteen months ago in a conversation you were not part of.
The wider market makes this more likely, not less. The lang cat’s State of Advice Report 2025 found that just 9% of UK adults had paid for financial advice in the previous two years, while 91% of those who did take advice found it valuable. It also describes an advice profession of fewer than 5,000 firms, whose average client is 59 and whose average new client arrives with a £411,000 portfolio.
Read that against your own client list and it says something specific. Regulated advice has concentrated on people who are older and already wealthy. Most owner-managed clients are neither — right up until the year they sell the business or draw their pension, at which point they become precisely the client every adviser wants. Someone will make that introduction. The only question is whether it is you.
What one relationship is worth, and what it costs to lose it
It is worth putting figures on this rather than leaving it as a feeling. The arithmetic below is illustrative — invented for the purpose of showing the shape of the loss, not drawn from any client or any firm.
Take a client paying £4,800 a year for accounts, corporation tax and payroll, plus roughly £1,200 a year of ad-hoc work — a company purchase of own shares here, a mortgage reference there. That is £6,000 a year. Run for nine years, the relationship carries £54,000 of fees. End it in year four and it carried £24,000. The £30,000 difference was never at risk from a competitor’s price list. It was lost to a relationship.
Two things usually get left out of that sum. The first is replacement cost: the marketing spend and the partner and manager hours needed to win and onboard a like-for-like client, which are real and rarely measured. The second is the referrals that client would have made and now will not, because they are recommending someone else.
A firm that files the returns can be replaced by another firm that files the returns. A firm the client phones first cannot.
Three things that change inside the practice
The year-end meeting stops being entirely about the past. Compliance meetings are, by their nature, a discussion of a year that has already happened. A partnership adds a forward-looking item that does not require you to become a planner: you observe what the numbers show and offer to open a door. The specific things worth observing are set out in the six signals already sitting in your client file.
Managers and seniors get something to do with what they notice. Your staff already see the £310,000 sitting in a deposit account and the director turning 55 next March. Most say nothing, quite correctly, because they have been trained not to stray anywhere near regulated territory. A documented introducer arrangement gives them a permitted sentence and a defined stopping point, which is more useful than another reminder about what they must not say. Where that line sits is covered in accountant and financial planner: who does what.
“Do you do financial planning?” gets a straight answer. Not “we do” — your firm does not, and should not claim to. The answer becomes: no, and we work with a regulated firm who does. All advice comes from Equity & General Financial Services, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (No. 474163). That is a better answer than a shrug, and it is one any member of staff can give without stepping over a line.
What it does not change, said plainly
- It gives you no regulated permissions, and needs none. Your firm introduces; the authorised firm advises. Nothing regulated happens inside the practice.
- It is not a new technical service line. There is no syllabus for your team to learn and no product knowledge to maintain, because the advice is not yours to give.
- It guarantees nothing. Some clients will say no, some already have an adviser they are happy with, and no outcome for any client can be promised.
- It will not repair a practice with a service problem. If your compliance work is habitually late, retention is not a referral question and no partnership will fix it.
- It is not a revenue plan. The commercial model is a matter of fact rather than promotion, and it is set out in the free partner guide rather than dressed up here.
The count you can run this week
Before deciding anything, spend an hour with your client list and produce a number. Flag every client where at least two of the following are true:
- Retained profit has risen for two years or more with no extraction plan attached to it.
- Cash at bank sits well above the working capital the business actually needs.
- A shareholder or director is aged 50 or over.
- There is a personal guarantee, new borrowing or a new lease behind the balance sheet.
- There has been an approach from a buyer, or a shareholder change is being discussed.
Then apply a decision rule. Fewer than five flagged clients: park it and look again after the next round of year-ends. Five to fifteen: one partner can carry it, raising it as it comes up. More than fifteen: write the triggers into your year-end file review so they get spotted by the person doing the work rather than remembered by a partner.
If the number justifies going further, how it works sets out the partnership end to end, and anatomy of an introduction follows a single introduction through all six of its steps.
Common questions
Will introducing our clients to a financial planner put our own fees at risk?
No, because the compliance work is not what the planner does. Equity & General advises on pensions, protection, investments and retirement income. It does not prepare statutory accounts, file corporation tax returns, run payroll or handle VAT, and the Introducer Agreement is explicit that the accountancy relationship stays where it is. The risk runs the other way. Firms lose owner-managed clients when a third party arrives with a wider conversation and no accountant attached to it, then recommends their own. An introduction you make keeps you in the room, and keeps the summary of what was implemented coming back to your file rather than disappearing.
Does an introducer partnership affect our professional indemnity insurance?
Tell your insurer, and expect the conversation to be short. The activity you are describing is an introduction: you flag something you have seen in the accounts, obtain the client consent, and pass their contact details to a firm authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. You do not advise on, arrange or recommend a regulated product, and you do not opine on whether a course of action suits that client. The Introducer Agreement puts that boundary in writing, which is usually the document the underwriter wants to see. Send it with your renewal information rather than mentioning it afterwards, and keep a copy on the practice compliance file.
We already refer clients to a local IFA. Why formalise it?
Because an informal referral usually has no consent record, no agreed boundary and no way back. Three things change when the arrangement is documented. The client consent is recorded before any detail moves, which is a data-protection point as much as a courtesy. The regulatory line is written down instead of assumed, so your firm can show exactly where its role stopped. And the loop closes: you are told when contact was made and, with the client agreement, what was put in place. Informal referrals tend to fail on that last point, which is why so many partners stop making them after two or three.
Does this make our practice more attractive to a buyer?
Nobody can promise you a valuation uplift, and any firm that does should be treated with suspicion. What can be said is what buyers examine: recurring fee income, client concentration, how long clients stay and how dependent the relationships are on one departing partner. Introductions touch the middle two. A client with a second professional attached to the relationship, and a documented reason to keep speaking to your firm between year-ends, is a stickier client than one who receives only a compliance service. Whether that shows up in a multiple depends entirely on the buyer, the market and the rest of your numbers.
How many clients does a firm need for this to be worth doing?
Run the count in the article before deciding, because the honest answer for some firms is none. If fewer than five clients on your list carry two or more of the triggers, park the idea for a year and revisit at the next round of year-ends. Between five and fifteen, one partner can carry it informally, raising it as it arises rather than running a campaign. Above fifteen it is worth structuring properly, with the triggers written into your year-end file review so managers flag them rather than relying on a partner remembering. Volume is not the point. Fit is.