Mid-sized UK IFA firms with 10 to 50 RIs are Wealth Analytica's primary target. The problems at this size are governance problems, not feature problems — one CIP coherent across three paraplanners, one fact-find standard observable from the ops manager's desk, one set of suitability reports the compliance officer can sample without launching five tools. WA gives the firm a single client record across the lead-to-proposal pipeline with Intelliflo and Morningstar live underneath. The ops manager spends Mondays on something other than reconciliation.
The 20-RI shape
It's Monday morning. The firm runs twenty RIs across two offices, three paraplanners between them, an ops manager who joined from a wealth manager three years ago, and a compliance officer on a day-and-a-half retainer. The CIP review's overdue. The MPS due-diligence file's split across an Intelliflo folder, a OneDrive folder and a Box folder, depending on which paraplanner created which version. Two of the three paraplanners use FE Analytics; the third inherited a Morningstar Workstation seat from a senior who left in 2023 and nobody cancelled. The vulnerability spreadsheet — every firm has one — is on the ops manager's desktop.
This is the firm WA was built for. None of the problems are exotic. They're the ordinary drag of running a multi-adviser practice on tooling that was never designed to coordinate.
What governance actually means at 20 RIs
Consumer Duty year 2 is the live test. The compliance officer needs to evidence — on a board agenda, with data, quarterly — that good outcomes are being delivered consistently across the advisers. That means:
- One CIP version that everybody uses. Not a 2023 PDF that adviser-five still references because it's in his email.
- One fact-find template across the firm. Including the vulnerability indicators, the ESG/SDR preferences, the capacity-for-loss inputs.
- A way to sample suitability reports at random for the quarterly review without launching three platforms.
- An audit trail showing who changed which client record and when, end-to-end, not stitched from three logs.
- A way to see, by adviser, who's behind on ongoing service reviews — and what proportion of clients in the over-65 segment have been reviewed for vulnerability in the last 12 months.
Five things. None of them are software features in the brochure sense — they're emergent properties of having one platform instead of five. The firm with a fragmented stack can do them, but it's a manual report off five sources, not a Monday-morning dashboard.
Paraplanner pooling across the firm
At 20 RIs you usually have three paraplanners. The traditional setup has each paraplanner allocated to a fixed set of advisers. The modern setup pools them — work flows to whoever's free, which evens out workload and creates resilience when someone's on annual leave. Pooling only works if the work is structured the same way from every adviser.
WA enforces the structure without enforcing the style. Every fact-find runs the firm's chosen template. Every risk profile uses the firm's chosen scoring. Every proposal is built off the firm's CIP. The paraplanner picks up any adviser's work and the workflow looks familiar. The ops manager finally gets the data that lets them see capacity — who's overloaded this week, who's got slack — and balance it.
The maths for a 20-RI firm
Concrete numbers. A 20-RI firm running the typical Intelliflo + FE + Voyant + a proposal tool + a suitability assistant runs subscriptions around £58,000 a year. Three paraplanners, each spending around a third of their week on cross-system data movement (the common pattern we see in fragmented stacks), costs roughly £64,000 a year in labour. Error correction, integration maintenance and onboarding overhead add another £25,000 or so. All-in stack cost: somewhere around £147,000 a year.
WA at 23 seats (20 advisers plus the three paraplanners) is £27,300 a year. The paraplanner data-movement line falls by roughly three-quarters to about £16,000. Integration goes to zero. The error-correction line halves. All-in: about £52,000 against £147,000. The £95,000 of headroom is what most firms at this size deploy into another adviser hire, into the brand work that's been on the wishlist, or — most often — into the reserve that lets the firm say no to acquisitions it doesn't actually want.
Detailed worked example: the consolidation maths article.
When mid-firm consolidation doesn't work
Two honest exceptions. First: the firm whose competitive edge is institutional-grade cashflow planning. Voyant or Timeline at depth is hard to replicate; if cashflow's your differentiator, keep the specialist and use WA for the rest. Second: the firm mid-acquisition or mid-Consumer-Duty-evidence-cycle. Migration in the middle of either is a fight you don't want. Wait six months, then revisit.
Outside those two cases, the maths at this size has consistently favoured consolidation in every firm we've costed honestly. Pull your real numbers and check ours against yours.
Last reviewed: 15 May 2026 · Reviewed quarterly · Author: Michael Fasosin · Editor: Anthony Marris · See our editorial policy.
Cost your stack against ours
A 60-minute session with your ops manager and one of our team. We'll cost your current stack — real subscription bills, real paraplanner hours, real integration spend — against WA at your headcount. You leave with the maths, in writing, whichever way it lands.