Financial Adviser Service Awards 2025

A year of change and challenge

The Financial Adviser Service Awards are now in their 35th year, marking years of consistent, first-class service from providers to advisers and their clients.

For the five-star winners in this year's awards, delivering top-notch service to intermediaries has come amid a year of great change and challenge.

Change — because technology and AI is ushering in the fourth industrial revolution and forcing companies to adopt and adapt to client demands for faster, better and more efficient service.

And challenge — because amid persistently high inflation and global uncertainty, the UK is facing sweeping changes to the tax treatment of pensions and inheritances.

FT Adviser has reported throughout 2025 on how advisers are seeing higher-than-ever volumes of new client inquiries as a result of the proposed changes to the tax treatment of pensions in April 2027.

But there have also been positive changes, brought about because of a challenge I set at the 2024 FASAs to those providers who do not follow our five-star winners' example in delivering great standards of service to advisers and clients.

Last year, I told those who attended the celebration at the Natural History Museum: “FT Adviser is coming for them; we will find them and we will hold them to account.”

And we did. In the weeks that followed we wrote name-and-shame articles about those who consistently delivered sub-par service.

Among those we discovered were some companies that had been delivering one-star service year after year — in one case for 19 years straight.

Nineteen!

We put this to them and they were understandably aggrieved. Some questioned our methodology (which has been tried and tested for 35 years). Some claimed they had never heard of the FASAs (highly unlikely). Most were abashed to find out just how many thousands of registered, regulated IFAs actually take the time to score providers.

After we published our findings, several companies rang us to ask what they could do better over the next 12 months.

This year I am pleased to announce that several companies pulled their socks up. One major bank left its decades-old one-star streak behind to score three stars.

They told me: “We’ve taken a very deliberate but simple approach in the last year: listening more to intermediaries and then delivering what they’re asking for. We’re pleased with our achievement but we’re not complacent — a five-star service is what we’re aiming for.”

Across the board we’ve seen a turnaround — as companies look at the examples set by our five and four-star winners.

The world as we knew it 35 years ago has changed immensely. We know more about health and wealth than we ever did in 1990, and over the next decade we will see immeasurable challenges and changes to the way in which financial services operate.

But even if AI can do all the admin, it cannot provide the empathy, compassion and support that advisers and their clients need from financial services providers.

Those five-star winners here have proved they keep the customer and the adviser at the heart of everything they do — and we are confident such firms will continue to deliver first-class service to their clients, regardless of what the next 35 years will bring.

Read on to find out which providers were rightly celebrated at the Natural History Museum last night (November 20th).

The event itself was sponsored by Royal London; the voting was done by thousands of FT Adviser readers, the scoring was ranked by Coredata and the special awards were assessed by a panel of adviser judges — a big thank you to all who helped make the 2025 Financial Adviser Service Awards such a success.

Simoney Kyriakou is editor of FT Adviser