Replacing Extraction with Empowerment — Restoring Truth, Trust & Freedom in Finance
By Steve Conley, Founder of the Academy of Life Planning (AoLP) & Get SAFE
The Financial Conduct Authority has just sounded another quiet alarm.
In a review published on 31 October 2025, the FCA warned that mounting debt, weak governance, and conflicted incentives within private-equity-backed financial advice groups could threaten clients, advisers, and the wider financial system.
This isn’t just a technical story about “leverage ratios” or “incentive structures.”
It’s a story about the soul of financial advice — and the silent return of the very forces the Retail Distribution Review was meant to end.
⚠️ The Hidden Engine Behind “Growth”
Over the past decade, the UK advice sector has been swept up in a wave of consolidation.
Private equity investors — drawn by stable recurring fees and a steady pipeline of clients — have been buying up independent firms at a record pace.
They promise advisers an exit, clients “efficiency,” and the industry “scale.”
But the real engine behind the boom is debt.
The FCA’s review revealed that consolidators have collectively amassed over £3.4 billion in borrowings, often at high interest rates. Many of these loans are secured against the very regulated advice firms that hold client money and trust.
In other words, the debt sits above the firm — but its risk runs straight through it.
đź’Ą When Client Interests Become Collateral
In some groups, the FCA found that:
- Regulated subsidiaries had guaranteed the parent company’s loans or pledged their assets as collateral.
- The parent company depended on cash transfers from advisers’ earnings to service its debts.
- There was no effective stress testing of what would happen if markets fell or cashflow dried up.
This structure, known as double leverage, is the financial equivalent of balancing a pyramid upside down. It works — until it doesn’t.
If the holding company defaults, clients’ interests can become subordinate to those of the lenders.
That means in a collapse, it’s not the advisers or investors who are first in line — it’s the banks that funded the buyouts.
🎠The Return of Conflicted Advice
Debt is only half the story. The other half is incentives.
The FCA found that many consolidators offered explicit or implicit inducements for advisers to funnel client assets into in-house investment products — group-managed portfolios, platforms, or funds.
On paper, firms maintained “conflicts of interest registers.”
In practice, those registers sat on a shelf while advisers were quietly pressured to “keep money in the family.”
The regulator noted “tick-box due diligence,” “unclear mitigation,” and “poor consideration of conflict management.”
Sound familiar? It should. This is commission culture reborn — not through inducements paid by product providers, but through internal cross-subsidies designed to service debt.
🧩 Governance Decay in Disguise
As these groups balloon through acquisition, many fail to scale their compliance, culture, and oversight.
Boards lack independent challenge.
Management information is fragmented across multiple entities.
Due diligence on acquired firms is rushed or formulaic.
The FCA called some reviews “tick-box” exercises that didn’t even verify basic compliance.
The result? A growing number of advisers now work inside highly leveraged structures where corporate solvency is treated as a private matter, but client outcomes depend on it completely.
🧠A Regulator’s Warning — Without Reform
The FCA insists it is not setting new expectations — merely reminding firms of existing responsibilities.
That is regulatory code for: we see the risk, but we’re not ready to act.
It’s the same language we heard before British Steel, before London Capital & Finance, before the mini-bond collapse. Each time, consumers bore the cost of institutional blindness.
The real question is whether the FCA will intervene before the next collapse, or simply issue another round of “lessons learned” afterwards.
đź’ˇ What This Means for Advisers
If you’re an adviser working under a consolidator, ask yourself:
- Who owns your firm?
- Who holds its debt?
- What happens to your clients if the group misses a payment?
If your income, your compliance budget, and your clients’ trust are all being used to service someone else’s leverage, you are not part of a growth story — you are part of a harvest strategy.
Advisers deserve better. So do clients.
🌱 The Empowerment Alternative
At the Academy of Life Planning, we built our model on the opposite philosophy:
- No debt. No inducements. No product bias.
- Planning life before planning money.
- Human capital before financial capital.
Our planners are free — free to serve, free to speak truth, free to live by conscience rather than commission.
Where the old model extracts value from people, the new model creates value through people.
Where the old model builds balance sheets, the new model builds sovereignty.
Where the old model hides behind complexity, the new model restores structural trust — transparency, simplicity, and purpose.
🔄 Replacing Extraction with Empowerment
The FCA’s findings confirm what many of us have been saying for years:
The consolidation model is not sustainable.
It’s a treadmill that feeds short-term investors at the expense of long-term trust.
The empowerment model is the only credible alternative — one that decentralises power, aligns money with meaning, and builds resilience instead of fragility.
We are witnessing the end of the Extractive Age of finance.
The question is: who will have the courage to step into the Empowerment Age?
🚀 Join the Movement
If you’re an adviser ready to break free from the debt-fuelled, product-bound structures of the old order — join us.
Become a Holistic Wealth Planner.
Build your own Financial Life Coaching practice.
Or start by exploring Planning My Life — our free self-directed platform that puts individuals back in charge of their own financial destiny.
Together, we can build a system that truly serves the people — not the lenders, not the shareholders, not the consolidators.
That’s how we replace extraction with empowerment.
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