Wealth management survey report – 2026

This report focuses on discretionary portfolio management, where firms manage investments for clients. Firms supervised by our wealth management portfolio support more than 5.5 million retail clients, manage almost £1 trillion of assets and are evolving quickly as they grow, specialise, consolidate and use more technology.

This change brings opportunity. A stronger wealth management sector can support growth, build trust in investing and help more clients make better-informed decisions about their financial futures and get better outcomes.

But growth must be matched by strong standards. Firms need clear governance, strong financial crime controls and they should provide fair value, effective support for clients as well as responsible use of technology, including AI.

This report shares data and insights to help firms understand the market, compare their approach and raise standards.

As set out in Annex A, the findings are based on survey data from around 400 wealth management firms, supported by regulatory returns and other FCA and public data sources.

Our aim is to support a competitive, innovative and resilient wealth market where firms can grow responsibly, and clients receive clearer information, better support and good outcomes.

Lucy Castledine, Director of Consumer Investments, FCA

Fighting financial crime is central to our strategy. It protects clients and firms, keeps markets clean and supports growth by preventing criminals from undermining confidence in the financial system.

Firms are a vital line of defence. We expect them to be set up to combat financial crime, with controls that work in practice and keep pace as technology and client channels change.

We are seeing progress in how often firms refresh Know Your Client checks, with more firms showing a risk-based approach driven by their client risk assessment. All firms in our most recent survey confirmed they were refreshing their checks. This is an improvement from 2023/24, when although the large majority of firms said they had done this, a small minority of them, 8%, said they did not do this at all.

But some weaknesses remain. Some firms do not refresh checks for higher-risk clients after a trigger event or at least once a year. Others have gaps in client and transaction data: 26% do not collect expected transaction frequency, 13% do not record expected investment amounts and around 10% do not verify source of wealth.

Checks are also weaker for some higher-risk relationships. Around 6% of firms do not check whether clients are politically exposed persons, meaning people in prominent public roles who may carry higher financial crime risk.

Around 7% do not carry out sanctions screening, which checks whether a person or organisation is subject to legal restrictions. It is a criminal offence not to comply with a financial sanction without a valid licence or authorisation from the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation.

Some firms also do not check adverse media, meaning negative public information that may point to higher risk.

These gaps matter. They make it harder to spot suspicious activity, identify higher-risk clients and meet legal duties.

We will continue to work with firms and partners to raise standards, tackle financial crime and build resilience.

Firms need effective monitoring and a simple process for raising concerns, so suspicious activity is identified and investigated.

Survey data helps us understand how firms are supporting clients with characteristics of vulnerability and whether clients receive fair value.

Gender and age among investment managers

Women make up around 16–17% of investment manager roles, although representation differs by age category. 17–18% of investment managers aged under 50 are female – compared with 11–12% among those aged over 50.

Our 2025 adviser survey found that 60% of client relationships include a woman. This creates an opportunity for the sector to better reflect the clients it serves through stronger recruitment, retention and progression.

Addressing the underrepresentation of women would better serve the population and increase the resilience of the sector.

The age profile of investment managers has been broadly stable over the past 5 years, with a median age of around 42 for women and 47 for men.

The wealth management sector has an important role in helping consumers make better-informed decisions, get better outcomes, build confidence and invest with trust. It is also changing quickly, as firms grow, consolidate, use more technology and serve a wider range of clients.

We want a competitive, innovative and resilient wealth market that supports sustainable growth and consistently delivers good client outcomes. That means firms need to understand our expectations clearly, use technology responsibly, maintain strong financial crime controls and make sure their governance and oversight keep pace as they grow.

The surveys help us identify risks earlier and focus our work where it can make the biggest difference. They also allow us to share insights back to the sector through this report. We have reduced the number of questions and narrowed the focus of the survey so that we collect the most useful data with less burden on firms.

We will not repeat the survey this year but will aim to issue a shorter version in 2027 focused on portfolio management activity. We will continue to look for smarter ways to use data and engage with the sector.

Our goal is simple: to help firms provide better outcomes for their clients and build greater confidence in the investments market.

The wealth management survey collects data that is not available from regulatory returns or other sources. We use it to better understand the portfolio, identify risks and share insights that can help firms improve outcomes. 

The statistics in the report are from the 2025 survey unless explained otherwise. Statistics from the 2025 survey are from firms' submission of their latest data from up to 31 December 2024, which they had until May 2025 to submit. The data should therefore be viewed as a point in time snapshot. We have chosen to share these insights in response to feedback from the sector.  Some questions rely on figures or calculations provided by firms. Where data quality was weaker, we removed it from the analysis. The figures in this report are based on the cleaned data and remain robust enough to support the insights presented.

We have run the survey three times since 2022 and refined it after feedback from firms and stakeholders. This means not every question appears in every year, so some results cannot be compared across all three surveys. 

The report focuses on discretionary portfolio management, where firms manage investments for clients. The 2025 survey covered around 400 firms whose main business is wealth management. Of these, 320 carried out portfolio management and 234 completed all three surveys. We used those 234 firms for trend analysis, as they provide a consistent comparison over time.

Some firms provide portfolio management alongside another main business, such as retail banking, private banking, financial advice or asset management. They were not included in the survey, but they are included in the wider market figures of around 500 firms and around 5,400 investment managers.

Some firms do not deal directly with clients and instead provide portfolio management through platforms or financial advisers. The survey does not capture average assets for these indirect clients because collecting this data would have placed too much burden on firms.

We tested the survey with 80 firms in 2022 and then refined it using feedback from firms and industry bodies.

The report also uses other sources, including regulatory returns, the FCA’s Financial Lives survey, the Financial Services Register and Office for National Statistics data. 

When we sent the survey to firms, we defined the terms set out in this Annex. 

The purpose of defining these terms was to help firms assess their own practices. These defined terms are limited to that purpose and may differ from definitions used by the FCA elsewhere.