Every accountant has a version of this client already: the one who mentions, almost in passing, that they haven't heard from their financial adviser in a while. Until now that was an anecdote — a single relationship that had gone quiet for reasons nobody could quantify. NextWealth's Financial Advice Business Benchmarks report, published this week and covered by Money Marketing and Professional Adviser on 9 and 10 September 2026, puts a number on it. Surveying 318 financial advice professionals, it found that 44% of the firms surveyed had switched off ongoing service fees for clients who no longer fit their model, and a further 20% had raised fees instead of dropping clients outright — rising to 41% at practices with fifty or more advisers.
That matters to you specifically, not just generally, because of where the evidence surfaces. A financial planning firm cutting its client book does not send a press release to the client's accountant. It shows up as a gap in a conversation you were already having — a client who used to mention their annual review and now doesn't, or one whose platform statement shows a fee that has quietly moved. You are frequently the only other professional in that client's life who would notice the change at all.
What NextWealth actually found
The FABB report is a benchmarking exercise, not a campaign document, which is exactly what makes its numbers useful. Alongside the headline fee and segmentation figures, it records that the average adviser surveyed looks after 88 client relationships with an average portfolio of £536,904, and that average minimum fees now sit at £1,949 for initial advice and £1,935 a year for ongoing service. Bringing a new client on board takes an average of 32 hours of staff time, with a further 62 hours a year to service the relationship afterwards. Emma Napier, NextWealth's consulting director, framed the shift as firms "making deliberate decisions about which clients fit their ongoing service model" in pursuit of "sustainable growth while meeting client needs" — which is a reasonable business rationale, and also, from the client's side of the desk, indistinguishable from being quietly let go.
Firms are not shrinking. 64% of those surveyed plan to grow by taking on new clients and 53% by growing assets from clients they already have; 49% of advisers already personally serve more clients than they did a year ago, the highest figure NextWealth has recorded. Growth and segmentation are the same strategy seen from two sides: capacity that used to be spread across a wide client bank is being reallocated towards the relationships a firm judges most worth keeping.
Why the squeeze is happening now
Three pressures compound at once in the NextWealth data. The first is plain arithmetic — with onboarding and servicing each costing dozens of hours of staff time, a firm with a fixed headcount can only add new clients by finding capacity somewhere, and dropping or repricing the least profitable existing relationships is the fastest lever available. The second is regulatory: 46% of the firms surveyed named the change bringing unused pension funds into the inheritance tax estate from April 2027 as a major driver of extra advice work, since it turns pension planning for anyone with a meaningful estate into a conversation that has to happen rather than one that can wait. The third is technology moving in the opposite direction to capacity — 47% of the firms surveyed already use AI tools internally, which should eventually ease the servicing burden, but has not yet caught up with the volume of client demand firms are chasing.
None of that is a criticism of the firms making these calls. A financial planning business managing its capacity is behaving exactly as a well-run accountancy practice would in the same position — most firms have, at some point, decided a particular type of engagement no longer fits the practice, or that a certain fee level no longer covers the risk. The point worth taking from it is narrower: this is happening at scale, right now, and the clients affected rarely tell anyone in the accountancy world it has happened, because there is nobody to tell until somebody asks.
The signal on your side of the relationship
None of this requires you to go looking for it. It shows up in the ordinary run of a year-end meeting: a client mentions their platform statement went up "again", or that nobody's called about a review "for a while", or that they cashed in an old policy themselves because they "couldn't be bothered chasing" their adviser. Any one of those, on its own, might mean nothing. Set against 44% of the firms surveyed actively narrowing their books this year, it is worth a single follow-up question rather than a shrug.
A dropped client rarely receives a letter that says so. The clearest evidence is the review that quietly stopped happening.
The client most likely to be affected is not the one you would guess. NextWealth's minimum fees — £1,949 to start, £1,935 a year to continue — sit well above what a modest portfolio can comfortably absorb, so the clients firms are most likely to segment out are not the wealthiest but the ones whose needs outgrew a "light-touch" tier without their assets growing to match. That is frequently a business owner in their forties or fifties: exactly the client an accountant is most likely to have on their own books, and exactly the client the wider advice gap already underserves. We set out the shape of that underlying shortage in the six signals already sitting in your client file.
What a joined-up response looks like
The useful move here is not to hand the client a name. It is to ask the question that establishes whether there is a gap at all: when did you last have a proper review, and does what's in place still match what you actually own? Most clients have never been asked that directly by anyone, because it falls between two professions rather than inside either one.
If the answer suggests the client's protection or investment arrangements have drifted out of date, what happens next is genuinely the client's choice — staying with their existing adviser and asking for a proper review, or looking elsewhere. Where a client does want a new introduction, the mechanics are ordinary and well understood: a fact-find with the new adviser, no cost or commitment at that stage, and a recommendation the client is free to accept or decline. The mechanics of an introduction and where the line sits between what an accountant does and what a regulated adviser does both set that process out in more detail than is useful to repeat here. The point for this article is narrower: noticing that a client's arrangements have gone stale requires no permissions and no referral relationship at all. It is ordinary client care, and it is more likely to happen if the accountant is the one asking the question, because the accountant is the professional the client is already sitting in front of.
A shortage, not just a fee rise
It is worth placing this alongside the wider advice gap rather than treating it as an isolated pricing story. The lang cat's State of Advice Report 2025 found that only 9% of UK adults had paid for financial advice in the preceding two years, against sub-5,000 IFA firms operating nationally, and that the average IFA client is 59 — a market that was already concentrated on a narrow, older, wealthier slice of the population before any firm reviewed its cost-to-serve metrics. NextWealth's findings describe the same shortage from the supply side: firms are not short of demand, they are short of capacity, and capacity is being allocated towards the clients who are cheapest to serve profitably rather than the clients who most need attention. Both figures describe the same underlying fact — the number of people who could benefit from a proper financial review comfortably exceeds the number of advisers available to give one — and this week's data suggests that gap is being managed by narrowing who currently gets served, not only by leaving new entrants outside it.
Two things worth doing this week
1. Add one question to the annual review agenda. "When did you last hear from your financial adviser, and has anything changed since then?" costs nothing to ask and takes ten seconds to answer. It surfaces exactly the clients this week's data suggests are quietly losing service, without requiring any judgement about whether that matters — the client tells you whether it does.
2. Note it, rather than acting on it alone. If a client's answer suggests their adviser relationship has lapsed or their circumstances have moved past what their existing arrangements cover, record it the way you would any other client observation — a jump in retained profit, a director approaching 55 — and raise it again at the next natural touchpoint if nothing has changed. The value is in the noticing being repeated, not in a single conversation resolving it.
What is still uncertain
NextWealth's report describes the proportion of firms making these changes; it does not disclose how many individual clients nationally have been dropped or repriced, or which portfolio sizes are most affected beyond the broad average figures given here. That granular breakdown has not been published alongside this release, and it is not yet possible to say how many clients any single accountancy practice is likely to have among them. The report is also a snapshot of firms' stated intentions and recent actions rather than a client-side survey, so it cannot say how the affected clients themselves are responding — whether they are seeking a new adviser, doing without, or simply not noticing yet. NextWealth's benchmarking series is produced periodically rather than to a fixed public timetable, so the next comparable data point is not yet scheduled.
Common questions
What did NextWealth's 2026 benchmarking survey actually find?
NextWealth's Financial Advice Business Benchmarks report, based on a survey of 318 financial advice professionals published in September 2026, found that 44% of the advice firms it surveyed had discontinued ongoing service fees for clients who no longer fit their service model, and 40% had formally reviewed cost-to-serve metrics for the first time. Rather than dropping clients outright, 20% raised fees instead - rising to 41% at practices with 50 or more advisers. The average adviser in the survey looked after 88 client relationships with an average portfolio of £536,904, against average minimum fees of £1,949 for initial advice and £1,935 a year for ongoing service. NextWealth's Emma Napier described this as firms making deliberate decisions about which clients fit their ongoing service model, in pursuit of sustainable growth.
Why are advice firms narrowing their client books now?
The NextWealth survey points to capacity pressure meeting growth ambition. 64% of the firms surveyed want to take on new clients and 53% want to grow assets from existing relationships, while 49% of advisers already personally serve more clients than they did a year ago. Servicing a client is not free: the survey found onboarding takes an average of 32 hours of staff time, with a further 62 hours a year to service the relationship afterwards. Nearly half, 46%, named the change bringing unused pension funds into the inheritance tax estate from April 2027 as a major driver of extra advice work, and 47% of the firms surveyed are already deploying AI tools to manage the load. Something has to give, and for many firms that has been the size and shape of the client bank rather than the size of the team.
What is the practical difference between a client being dropped and a client being repriced?
A dropped client has their ongoing service fee switched off entirely - the annual review stops, the adviser stops proactively contacting them, and the relationship typically continues only if the client asks for a one-off piece of work. A repriced client keeps the same service but pays more for it, sometimes considerably more: the NextWealth data shows fee increases were the chosen route at 41% of practices with 50 or more advisers, well above the 20% figure across the whole sample. Both outcomes leave the client with less attention than they had before, but only the second is obvious from a bill. The first is often invisible until somebody asks when the annual review last happened.
What should an accountant do if a client mentions their financial adviser has gone quiet?
Treat it as a factual observation worth a factual question, not an assumption. Ask when the client last had a review, whether their circumstances have changed since (a bonus year, a sale, a birthday that moved them past a milestone), and whether they still feel their protection and investment position matches what they actually own now. None of that requires giving regulated advice - it is the same kind of noticing an accountant already does when a client's turnover jumps or a director turns 55. What happens next, including whether and how the client looks for a new adviser, is entirely the client's decision to make and someone else's regulated work to carry out.
Is this the same as the advice gap the lang cat has written about?
It is a different mechanism producing the same shortage. The lang cat's State of Advice Report 2025 found that only 9% of UK adults had paid for financial advice in the preceding two years, against sub-5,000 IFA firms nationally - a gap usually described as people who were never in the market for advice to begin with. The NextWealth findings describe existing clients, already inside the system, being moved out of ongoing service or priced further from it. Both point the same way: the supply of attention available from regulated advisers is not growing as fast as the population that could use it, whether those people never had an adviser or have just lost meaningful access to the one they had.