And what to do about it before the next deal is already on the table.

Acquisition activity in UK wealth management is at record levels. Total deal value hit £20bn in 2025, and the pace has continued into 2026, with firms of all sizes racing to consolidate, scale and secure their position in a rapidly changing market.

What is consistently underestimated is what happens after the deal completes. The consolidation strategy might be sound, but the execution, for most firms, is where it falters.

Sally Merritt, Co-founder and CEO

In October 2025, the FCA published the findings of its multi-firm review of consolidation across the financial advice and wealth management sector. Its conclusion was pointed:

While some firms demonstrated strong acquisition and integration practices, many did not. Integration planning, governance and resourcing were identified as areas of increased risk across the sector.

I’ve been working with consolidating wealth management firms for long enough to say, with some confidence, that this doesn’t surprise me at all. What does surprise me is how consistently the same problems show up, and how consistently they could have been avoided.

The gap that rarely gets budgeted for

Most acquisition strategies have a clear financial strategy. Buy a firm with a strong client book, consolidate the cost base, generate revenue uplift through proposition harmonisation and cross-selling.

What the model less often accounts for is the operational complexity of actually bringing two businesses together at the level of people, process, data and technology. But being inherently difficult to measure doesn’t render it any less valuable. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s the very mechanism by which the financial strategy either stands up or it doesn’t.

For years, I felt like ‘Business Readiness’ (which, I appreciate, means different things to different people) was often seen as a ‘nice to have’ but not a ‘must have’. An important workstream but never on the critical path. Training and a bit of comms to tick a ‘comms strategy’ box. And always getting pushed to the right on the project plan.

The technology stack of an acquired firm is almost never clean. CRM systems are partially configured, incompletely used, or simply the wrong tool for the acquiring firm’s target operating model. Client data is held across multiple platforms, often with gaps, inconsistencies and duplications that nobody flagged during due diligence because nobody was looking at that level of detail. Review processes, workflow configurations, fee structures, document templates… all of these exist in forms that made sense for the acquired firm in isolation and make almost no sense when you try to map them onto the acquirer’s model.

And then there are the people. Advisers and operations staff who have developed their own ways of working, their own workarounds, their own spreadsheets (or worse – but by no means uncommon – their own paper folders). Their own informal processes that exist precisely because the technology was never quite configured to support what they actually needed to do. Or it was, but it was never rolled out and trained properly, which meant that – for all intents and purposes – it was useless to them.

You can’t see those workarounds in a data room. You only find them when you’re six weeks into an integration and wondering why adoption of the new CRM is lower than it should be.

The deal gets done. The champagne gets opened. And then, somewhere between completion and the first joint town hall, everyone quietly realises that the hard part is by no means over.

What we actually find when we go in

We’ve been brought into integrations at various stages, sometimes before the ink is dry on the deal, sometimes considerably later than that. The later engagements tend to share certain characteristics.

There’s almost always a data problem that is larger than anyone acknowledged. Client records that were described as ‘broadly complete’ turn out to have significant gaps in suitability information, fact finds, vulnerability flags and review history. Fee structures that were described as ‘aligned’ turn out to require individual client-level reconciliation across multiple platforms. Tiered fee packages that look great on paper but can’t actually be calculated across the myriad of platforms being used by each client. And the MI reporting that leadership assumed would give them a consolidated view of the combined business either doesn’t exist yet, or exists in a form that requires manual intervention to be usable.

There is almost always a people problem that is being masked by goodwill and sheer hard work. Advisers, paraplanners and administrators are often working harder than they were before the acquisition, absorbing additional administrative burden with good grace, but with a quietly (or sometimes not so quietly!) accumulating sense that the technology is not helping them do their jobs.

Workarounds multiply, and manual processes persist. And because everyone is busy and the workload is high, the problems don’t get fixed, they get absorbed into the fabric of how the business runs and it all just becomes the ‘new normal’.

And there is almost always a lack of confidence in the technology itself. In one integration we were brought into, we found that a member of the advice team had developed a habit of screenshotting every single piece of new business she processed, because she had stopped trusting that the system would retain the information accurately. She wasn’t doing this because she was particularly risk-averse. She was doing it because, at some point, something had gone wrong, and nobody had fixed it, and she had quietly concluded that it was safer to create her own paper trail. That kind of behaviour is the canary in the coal mine. Where one adviser is doing it, others are compensating in other ways.

When your people don’t trust the technology, they work around it. When they work around it, the data degrades. When the data degrades, the business case for the acquisition starts to erode, quietly and persistently, from the inside.

The compounding effect on growth

The part that I don’t feel gets discussed enough but arguably offers the biggest commercial opportunity to unlock, is that integration problems don’t just create operational pain. They directly constrain the pace at which a consolidator can continue to acquire.

If your team is managing the fallout from an incomplete integration, their capacity to prepare for, execute and absorb the next acquisition is diminished. Due diligence quality suffers, integration planning is rushed, and the cycle continues. And the BAU practitioners, instead of strengthening those client relationships and identifying new business opportunities, are busy cleansing the acquired legacy data in order to get their records in shape.

We’ve worked with firms where the operational drag from incomplete earlier integrations was, once properly quantified, materially affecting their acquisition cadence. Firms that were capable of making four acquisitions a year were effectively constrained to two or three, not because of capital availability or deal flow, but because the back-office infrastructure couldn’t support the pace. When you model what that means over five years, the compounding effect on enterprise value is significant.

Conversely, the firms that invest properly in integration infrastructure, clean data models, well-configured CRM workflows, properly trained people, and documented and repeatable processes, are the ones that can sustain acquisition activity at pace. They’ve essentially built an integration capability rather than treating each acquisition as a bespoke project. That distinction matters enormously, both for operational performance and for the firm’s attractiveness to future acquirers or investors.

What good integration actually looks like

It starts earlier than most firms think. The operational and technology due diligence that happens before a deal completes should be informing the integration plan, not just flagging red flags. Understanding the data quality, the CRM configuration, the workflow maturity and the process dependencies of the target firm before completion means that the integration roadmap is grounded in reality rather than optimistic assumptions.

It also requires a granular level of detail that advisory-level work rarely delivers. Knowing that a firm’s data quality is ‘variable’ is not the same as knowing which specific fields are incomplete, which client records require manual remediation, and which elements of the acquired firm’s proposition need to be rebuilt rather than migrated. That level of detail is unglamorous. It doesn’t feature in deal announcement press releases. And, in my experience, not many consultancies can get into that level of detail because they don’t have the hands-on understanding of the process, the technology or the intricate data structures of a wealth management business.

And that is the difference between an integration that delivers the expected synergies on time and one that quietly disappoints.

The human layer matters as much as the technical one. The advisers, paraplanners and operations staff in the acquired firm are all usually carrying knowledge that doesn’t exist anywhere in the documentation. The fastest way to lose that knowledge is to impose a new technology stack without involving them in its design. The fastest way to retain it, and to generate genuine engagement with the new model, is to treat the front office as partners in the integration rather than recipients of it. The classic adage that I’ve used many times in the past of doing it “with them, not to them”.

And finally, it requires someone who will actually do the work. Not produce a slide deck or report about the work. Not facilitate a workshop about the work. But truly get into the CRM, understand the data, map the journeys, configure the workflows, train the people, and stay alongside the business until the new model is genuinely embedded. That sounds obvious, but in practice it is surprisingly rare and the very reason why we do what we do.

Strategy is easy. Integration is hard. The firms that treat them as equally important, and invest accordingly in both, are the ones that build something that compounds in value over time.

A note on timing

The firms we see navigating integration most successfully are increasingly the ones that engage integration support before they need it, ideally during due diligence, and certainly before the completion date. The firms that engage us after a problem has developed are, without exception, paying more to fix it than they would have paid to prevent it.

Early involvement means that the integration plan is realistic, the data migration is planned properly, the legacy data is cleansed properly, the CRM is configured ahead of go-live rather than after it, and the people in the acquired firm arrive at the new operating model with confidence rather than anxiety.

If you are in the middle of an acquisition, or about to begin one, and the operational integration is being treated as something that will sort itself out once the deal is done, it is worth having a conversation before that assumption proves expensive.

You can DM me directly, or get in touch at hello@evotra.co.uk or 020 3410 1966

Written by: 

Sally Merritt, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer