Financial Adviser Service Awards 2024
Find out which companies have provided advisers and their clients with the best service this year
Who shone bright at the Financial Adviser Service Awards 2024?
The votes are all in, the scores have been counted and the awards have been awarded at the 34th annual Financial Adviser Service Awards.
And what a year it has been! The difficulties inherent in aligning with the consumer duty regulations and making sure that all provision for closed book clients was also fully compliant has taken up a significant amount of providers' time over the past 12-18 months.
Not to forget the immense workload caused by errors in HMRC calculations around the ending of the Lifetime Allowance, shifting strategies and products in line with a new government's financial plans, and keeping communication with advisers and clients during a geopolitically turbulent year.
With all this as a backdrop to the work being done by financial services professionals, it is unsurprising that fewer four and five stars were awarded this year, compared with the number awarded in 2023.
It means those who achieved five-star status in our awards should be extra proud of their success, as determined by thousands of FT Adviser readers who took the time to vote.
Those who also got four stars should feel proud that in such a time as this, advisers scored them highly on a series of metrics, ranging from the time it takes to turn around client requests, through to the provision of training and dedicated helplines.
For the first time in many years, FT Adviser introduced a new category in which advisers could cast their votes - Technology Provider.
We also launched five self-submit categories:
- Best business marketing and promotion service to advisers
- Best regulation and compliance service for advisers
- Best delivery PII service to advisers
- Best legal support to advisers
- Best business growth and succession planning for advisers.
These latter categories aim to showcase those providers sitting outside of product development and sales but whose dedication to delivering business services to advisers deserves recognition.
Entries for these five new categories were judged by a panel of expert advisers from FT Adviser's editorial board, for whom we are immensely grateful.
Here's to even greater success in 2025.
Simoney Kyriakou is editor of FT Adviser
Highlights from the night
As our special FASAs 2024 highlights video (below) shows, truly exceptional service leads to exceptional results – for clients, advisers and the companies themselves.
All the categories and all the winners!
Methodology
Em Fitzgerald
Em Fitzgerald
Capturing the data: Coredata
Global market research consultancy Coredata has been providing the data and analysis behind the Financial Adviser Service Awards for nearly two decades.
Not only does it collect and collate all the scores, but it also runs the individual scores through a series of checks to verify the votes and voters, and make sure the end results are robust and accurate.
According to the company: "Our research focuses on understanding the challenges facing asset owners and asset influencers, driven from our world class research capabilities and global network of partners.
"Our experience provides us with a deep understanding of the broader global financial services market, with a focus in fund management, financial planning, retirement solutions, investment platforms, product development, retail saving, banking, and mortgage brokering."
The methodology
For the voting, advisers were given four business weeks to fill out a form online, scoring companies across a variety of metrics.
These include: new business processing, speed of response, quality of technological support, product choice, flexibility, communication, training and business support, to name just a few.
The self-submit categories, which were new for 2025, were judged by a panel of advisers, service providers and journalists from FT Adviser.
Any judge with links to providers in the new categories were not included in the judging for those categories.
Marks were given for a variety of metrics, including the quality of the submissions, the amount of verifiable data provided to back up the submission, the amount of business conducted by the companies in proportion to their size, and independent trust ratings on selected outlets, such as VouchedFor and TrustPilot.
Meet our 2024 judging panel
FT Adviser is grateful for the support of our Editorial Panel, who took several hours out of their busy weeks to help judge our entries.
Alongside FT Adviser senior staff, the judges were:
Adrian Barrick, editorial director, FT Specialist
Amy Austin, FT Adviser
Carmen Reichman, FT Adviser
Damian Fantato, FT Adviser
Darren Cooke, Red Circle Financial Planning
David Trenner, formerly of Intelligent Finance
Jane King, Ash Ridge Private Finance
Joanna Streames, Velvet Mortgage & Insure Services
Mandy Dale, Hanbury Wealth
Rohan Sivajoti, NextGen Financial Planners
Simoney Kyriakou, FT Adviser