Investor FAQs

• We plan, grow and protect the financial futures of over a million clients across the UK by providing holistic advice-led wealth management, delivered exclusively by the Partnership, our group of more than 4,900 highly skilled advisers.
• We have an integrated client offering that provides financial advice, product and platform, and investment management as part of a single service.

Data correct as at 31 December 2024

• We’re one of the UK’s leading providers of expert financial advice. This is delivered by the Partnership, our workforce of more than 4,900 advisers who have been helping people make the right financial choices for decades. This group of experienced and highly qualified professionals is based predominantly across the UK, with a small presence in Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, building trusted relationships with clients centred around holistic financial planning and long-term investments.
• Within the Partnership are approximately 2,600 different businesses. The advisers who run these businesses are called Partners. They employ additional advisers to make up the more than 4,900 advisers within the Partnership, along with business support staff. Advisers are not employed by SJP.

Data correct as at 31 December 2024.

• The best investment talent is not limited to one firm or location. To manage clients’ investments in the best possible way, aiming to deliver great client outcomes, we need the freedom and flexibility to harness the skills of some of the world’s most talented fund managers.
• This is why we do not employ in-house investment managers. Instead, we carefully select a number of external managers to manage our range of SJP funds on a sub-advisory basis.
• Some wealth advisers can only offer their investors a range of UK-based funds and managers. Our approach, however, gives clients access to fund management expertise that is often only available to large institutional or overseas investors.
• These exclusive relationships set our approach apart, providing clients with diversification and investment expertise that is beyond the scope of many wealth advisers.
• We constantly monitor fund manager performance, and our approach means we can quickly appoint or remove external managers from our range of funds should we deem this to be in the best of interests of our clients.

More information about our investment management approach can be found here.

• When clients invest with us they pay for our advice, the products we recommend and investment management. The charges for our advice and products can be found here, and they set out both the component parts and the total charges clients might expect to pay. Investment management charges vary depending on the funds clients choose to invest in.

• Our aim is to achieve good client outcomes, and that means we're always seeking to improve the investment performance, charges and services we deliver to clients. Our annual Value Assessment Statement provides further information.
• Ensuring businesses deliver good outcomes for clients is at the heart of the Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty which came into effect at the end of July 2023. Like all other businesses in our industry, one of our focuses included how to better deliver value to clients.

• Our market opportunity is very large and growing. UK individuals today have around £3.3 trillion in liquid investable assets spread across the broad spectrum of client segments (source: GlobalData). The marketplace is expected to grow at around 7% per annum compound over the period to 2030, driven by a combination of structural and cyclical factors including asset appreciation and growing provision for retirement.
• Given the complexity of understanding the areas of estate planning, tax, pensions, savings and investment, together with an aging population and the growing need for individuals to provide for their own retirement, we expect demand for advice to only grow further.

Read more about the market opportunity here.

• We set out our refreshed strategy as part of our 2024 Half Year results. You can read more about our strategy here.
• Our strategic ambitions are to:

             1. have leading adviser advocacy

             2. have high-performing, empowered and engaged colleagues

             3. keep annual retention of client investments above 95%

             4. achieve mid-to-high single digit annual FUM growth over time

             5. double the Underlying cash result from 2023 to 2030.

• The Partnership is critical to the success of our business as it’s our advisers who help attract and retain clients through building great relationships, delivering great financial advice, and supporting great client outcomes.
• A high-quality Partnership is key to growing our business. We aim to grow the Partnership over time, alongside increasing the productivity of those already in the Partnership.
• Growth in the Partnership is achieved by recruiting experienced advisers already in the industry, and training our own through our financial adviser Academy programme. 

• Since our foundation more than 30 years ago, we’ve always put the Partnership and clients at the heart of the business, ensuring we do everything we can to support the UK’s best financial advisers so they in turn can support their clients. This consistent and focused approach means we’ve been able to attract and retain great advisers to SJP.
• Our support for the Partnership is extensive, ranging from marketing, investment consultancy and technical support, through to coaching, technology and regulatory compliance among other areas.
• We also provide business loans to Partners. These are principally used to enable our Partners to expand by taking over the businesses of those who are retiring or downsizing. This creates broad benefits: clients benefit from continuity of advice, Partners benefit by realising value in the high-quality businesses they have created, and the Group benefits from high levels of adviser and client retention.

• The Academy is important to us in many regards: it helps us grow the Partnership by training and developing individuals new to financial advice; it helps us to continually ‘refresh’ the Partnership through graduating younger advisers; it brings diversity to the Partnership which in turn attracts a more diverse range of clients to SJP; and it supports effective succession planning within the Partnership.

• Technology enables our clients to engage more effectively with their adviser and their own investments; it enables advisers to run more efficient businesses and deliver great advice; and it enables SJP to grow our scale and capacity optimally over time.
• We have invested in modern, scalable technology infrastructure. At its core our technology stack has Bluedoor as our back-office administration system and Salesforce as our CRM. All our UK business has been administered on Bluedoor since 2019, and Salesforce was rolled out to each of our Partner businesses in 2021.
• Whilst we have no need to re-platform our business, we recognise the need to supplement our strong technology core. We will invest to:
  • develop adjacent technologies to drive strong client outcomes and a superior experience at scale; and
  • build our capabilities in utilising our rich data universe to drive intelligent insights.

• Our primary source of profit is annual product management charges on funds under management (FUM). This means growth in FUM is a strong positive indicator of future growth in profits. Annual product management charges are taken daily as a percentage of the value of FUM, and so fluctuate with investment market performance.
• Our secondary source of profit is initial product charges. These are a percentage of the initial client investment.
• Advice charges are not a key profit driver as most of these are offset by corresponding payments to Partners for providing the advice. See pages 20 and 21 in the Annual Report and Accounts 2024 for more detail.

• Well over two thirds of our total expense base varies in line with business volumes or with equal and opposite income, such as payments to Partners for the advice they provide and back-office administration costs. This means that these variable expenses generally have little bearing on profitability from one period to the next.
• We focus our attention on managing our controllable expense base, which does not vary with these factors. Around half of our controllable expense base relates to people.
• We maintain a disciplined approach to managing our costs. Over the course of 2024 to 2026 we are undertaking a cost and efficiency programme. The aim is to reduce our addressable cost base by £100 million per annum from 2027 onwards.

• In substance we are a wealth management group with a simple business model. However, as we have life insurance companies within the Group we apply IFRS accounting requirements for insurance companies. These requirements lead to IFRS financial statements which are more complex than those of a typical wealth manager.
• For example, our IFRS statement of financial position includes policyholder liabilities and the corresponding assets held to match them, and so policyholder liabilities increase or decrease to match increases or decreases experienced on these assets. This means that shareholders are not exposed to any gains or losses on the £190.0 billion of policyholder assets and liabilities recognised at 31 December 2024, which represented over 97% of our IFRS total assets.
• Similarly, our IFRS statement of comprehensive income includes policyholder tax balances which we are required to recognise as part of our corporation tax arrangements. This means that our Group IFRS profit before tax includes amounts charged to clients to meet policyholder tax expenses, which are unrelated to the underlying performance of our business.

• To address the challenges that IFRS accounting requirements present for our business, as detailed in the question above, we developed the Cash result as an alternative performance measure. This strips out life insurance-related policyholder balances to present only those elements of our financial statements which impact shareholders, and better reflects the way that cash emerges from the business.
• The Underlying cash result, which sits within the overall Cash result, strips out any one-off items and temporary timing differences. This is the primary measure we use when monitoring our performance, and it is the measure on which we have set our shareholder returns guidance. For more information, refer to pages 20 to 27 within the 2024 Annual Report and Accounts.

• For investment bond and pension business, we do not take annual product management charges for six years after the initial client investment. Business in this six-year period is known as ‘gestation FUM’. During this period it does not contribute to the Cash result apart from a day one margin arising on new business.
• Gestation FUM is a very significant store of value and gives a high degree of visibility to the emergence of additional, long-term cash flows. As at 31 December 2024, gestation FUM was £50.1 billion. Based on market levels at that date and assuming no withdrawals, this gestation FUM balance could contribute around £290 million per annum to the Cash result once it is all out of the first six year-period. There are no additional expenses associated with this contribution. For more information, refer to page 18 within the 2024 Annual Report and Accounts.

• Our IFRS statement of financial position contains policyholder liabilities and the corresponding assets held to match them. To understand the true assets and liabilities that the shareholder can benefit from, these policyholder balances, along with non-cash ‘accounting’ balances such as deferred income (DIR) and deferred acquisition costs (DAC), are removed in the Solvency II Net Assets balance sheet.
• We also have substantial headroom on our revolving credit facility (RCF): at 31 December 2024 we had undrawn credit of £345 million available under this facility.

• Our Life insurance business is subject to the Solvency II regime, which applied for the first time in 2016. The solvency ratio for our life companies stood at 154% at 31 December 2024, which is significantly ahead of our approach of holding 130% of the standard formula requirements.

• Our guidance is that we expect to return 50% of the Underlying cash result each year.
• For 2024, 2025 and 2026, this will comprise 18.00 pence per share in dividends, which will be split 6.00 pence per share at interim, and 12.00 pence per share as a final dividend.
• The balance will be returned through share buy-backs.

• In a share buy-back, a company purchases its own shares from the market. This is a way to return money to shareholders. Share buy-backs form part of our shareholder returns guidance.

• Our Responsible Business Framework focuses on four strategic ESG pillars:
  • Enabling financial wellbeing for our clients, our people and our communities 
  • Investing our client's money responsibly
  • Taking action on climate change 
  • Giving back to support local communities and regeneration
• These are underpinned by a number of people and governance topics, which we refer to as our ‘strategic enablers’.  
• During 2024, we undertook a double materiality assessment, aligned to the European Sustainability Reporting Standards. The assessment helped to confirm our material topics and better understand our stakeholders’ perspectives. 
• These material topics are incorporated into our Responsible Business framework, which will continue to focus our responsible business and sustainability-related efforts.

• We are proud to be rated as follows by two leading ESG ratings agencies, demonstrating our commitment to being a responsible business:
  • AAA by MSCI
  • Low Risk by Sustainalytics
• Our position statements on environmental, social and governance matters can be found in the ESG reporting hub.

• More information about our approach to being a responsible business can be found on our website, and within the Our Responsible Business report contained within the Annual Report & Accounts 2023.