Ep 110: M&A, private equity and the future of advice – Victoria Hicks, Founder & CEO | Melo Advisory

And, and the other feedback that we've had, uh, and picking up on a, a discussion we had on a previous, uh, podcast, is just the, I guess, the change in the industry in the UK, how much it actually looks like our industry maybe in five years.

Um-

Yeah

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but also I guess the, the trend that amazed me, I think the statistic at the time was that there's around 85% of the UK is now owned by private equity or through aggregators.

Is that right?

Yeah, I can believe that.

Like, it's a tale of two halves when you look at the sizes of business in the UK.

So you might...

This might relate to you.

You've got your very large firms, and the FCA kind of group those as having 50 advisors or more.

And as you said, they probably now own around 85% of the advisors that are delivering the advice.

But the majority of firms, if you were to just look by number of businesses, are actually very wee in the UK.

You know, sub five advisor firms absolutely still dominate, and there's a space for everybody.

Private equity, good, bad, indifferent, kind of whatever you feel about it, it's helped to create an exit route for a lot of people.

It's just when it all kicked off around sort of 2018, 2019 in the UK, so many private equity firms came in at the same time that there was so much demand that prices kind of rallied.

But also, the wrong matches were made, and if I was to sort of go back in time or to get a message across to a country that's gonna go through this, it's pay us, uh, protect the independent and the privately owned businesses, right? There is a space in the market for the private equity-backed consolidators.

They've got the money.

They've got the investment.

They've got the ability to deal with the advice gap, which is a big issue I know in Australia as, as well as it is in the UK.

But if you're running a Small business offering face-to-face advice.

It's really personal.

Maybe they're not the right outcome for you.

Maybe they are, but actually maybe opportunity within local to local buys or privately owned sales to privately owned buyers, like they have a space as well.

And in my view, too much of our market initially got swept up in the frenzy of the private equity coming in and making big offers.