Beyond traditional portfolios — tracking ETFs to crypto in a single client view

Your client mentions, in passing, that they've been buying individual shares on a retail trading app. They own a bit of Bitcoin. They have a workplace SAYE that's just matured. And there's an ISA somewhere they haven't moved over yet.

Do you advise on that picture, or do you advise on the picture your firm's systems can see?

For most UK IFAs in 2026, those are different pictures. And the gap between them is no longer a peripheral concern. Consumer Duty's outcomes obligation runs against the client's overall position, not just the assets sitting on the firm's recommended platform. Suitability has to make sense in the context of what the client actually holds. And the conversations clients want to have — about their crypto, their employer shares, their retail-broker positions — are the ones that build trust or quietly erode it.

What's actually changed about client portfolios

The mix has shifted on three dimensions:

ETFs as a default building block.UK ETF assets under management have grown faster than the wider fund market in the past five years, and they show up in client portfolios both through MPS allocations and through direct holdings on platforms like AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown, and Interactive Investor. The sector consensus from ETFGI's UK and European data is that ETF AUM has more than doubled since 2020. The exact figure is less important than the shape of the trend: ETFs now appear in materially more client portfolios than they did at the start of the decade.

Direct equities and self-directed trading.The Trading 212, Freetrade, eToro generation of platforms made commission-free dealing the default for a meaningful slice of UK adults. Most of those clients don't hold material wealth on those platforms, but a chunk do — and the chunk that does is mostly the clients you'd want to advise. The growth of the "satellite to a managed core" pattern is genuine.

Cryptoassets.FCA consumer research consistently puts UK adult cryptoasset ownership in the 9–12% range. Most holdings are small. A non-trivial minority are not. From a planner's perspective the question isn't whether the client should own crypto — the FCA's view on suitability of cryptoassets for retail clients is well-established and your firm's regulated permissions almost certainly don't extend to direct cryptoasset advice. The question is what you do about the holding the client already has.

The FCA's cryptoasset regime — what's binding on an IFA

Direct cryptoasset advice is outside the regulated-advice perimeter for most authorised IFAs and is intentionally so. What's binding on the firm's interaction with cryptoassets is the financial-promotions regime, codified in PS23/6 and the associated guidance in FG23/3, both effective from October 2023, with subsequent updates around stablecoins and the wider regulatory perimeter for fiat-referenced assets.

The practical implications for a financial-planning firm:

• Your firm cannot communicate a financial promotion for a qualifying cryptoasset unless the promotion meets the FCA's rules — restricted-mass-market category, with consumer warnings, cooling-off and the rest.
• You can discuss a client's existing cryptoasset holding in the context of their wider planning without that conversation being a financial promotion.
• The line between "discussing what the client holds" and "recommending what to do with it" is sharper than it used to be. Recording the conversation and the firm's position is sensible.

The upshot is that the firm needs to see the holding without acting on it. That requires the data, not the dealing capability.

The visibility problem

A typical UK IFA client today holds wealth across three to six different locations:

• The platform your firm recommended (one or two — the firm's primary panel)
• One or two legacy platforms from previous advice or workplace arrangements
• One or two retail platforms (Hargreaves, AJ Bell, Interactive Investor, Trading 212, Freetrade)
• A workplace pension elsewhere
• Employer share schemes (SAYE, SIP, executive share options)
• One or two cryptoasset exchanges or wallets

Most firms' systems see one or two of those. The fact-find captures the rest in free text. The result is a suitability assessment that's defensible against the firm's own scope, but partial against the client's reality.

What changes in 2026 is that the suitability obligation under Consumer Duty's products-and-services and price-and-value outcomes is increasingly being read against the wider holding. If a client's overall risk exposure is materially altered by holdings the firm chose not to see, the firm's recommendation on the bit it does see may not survive a second look.

What "consolidated view" should actually mean

A consolidated client view is not a Mint-style aggregation app for the adviser. It's a working position the firm can run a recommendation against. Three things have to be true for the view to be useful:

One.Holdings the firm can't trade need to appear in the model alongside the holdings the firm does manage. The risk weighting, the concentration check, the sector exposure, the FX exposure — all run across the whole picture.

Two.Pricing has to be current enough to be useful. Daily for most managed holdings. More frequent for direct equities the firm wants to comment on. The cryptoasset position needs a recent valuation, not last quarter's spreadsheet number.

Three.The provenance has to be clear. "Held on AJ Bell as at 14 May 2026, client-confirmed" is not the same as "held on the firm's panel platform". Suitability documentation reads the difference.

Most firms get this through a combination of fact-find capture, statement imports, and the firm's primary platform feed. The hard bit is keeping it current. The fact-find is current the day it was done; six months on, it's a sketch.

Where Wealth Analytica's research depth comes in

Wealth Analytica's research engine covers 150,000 listed securities across 70 global exchanges, with ETF universe coverage that lets the firm run a like-for-like comparison between, say, a managed fund the firm typically recommends and an ETF the client already holds. The platform's portfolio-analysis view sits across the firm's recommended holdings and the client-confirmed holdings on other platforms, so the suitability conversation runs against the whole position rather than the regulated slice of it.

It doesn't replace the firm's judgement on what to recommend. It replaces the half-hour spent pulling the position together before the recommendation conversation starts.

What to do this quarter

Three practical asks for a planner-led firm in 2026:

First, refresh the firm's fact-find prompts to capture cryptoasset, retail-platform, and employer-share-scheme holdings explicitly. Not because the firm advises on them — because the firm has to see them to advise on what it does advise on.

Second, decide and document the firm's policy on conversations about non-panel holdings. What can the firm comment on? What is comment-only versus a personal recommendation? Where does the firm draw the line on cryptoassets? Two paragraphs in the firm's advice-process document is enough; it's not enough to leave unwritten.

Third, look at the holdings you can't see. Pick five clients and ask them what they hold outside the firm's view. Compare to what the fact-find says they hold. The gap is your suitability risk and your trust-building opportunity in equal measure.