When firms merge, the silence costs more than the deal
I have spent more than twenty years inside financial services firms, including Charles Stanley, Coutts, RBS, BNY Mellon and Aviva Investors, and I have been part of acquisitions. Silence reads differently from inside the building than from outside it. Inside, you know the client proposition is safe and the integration is in hand. Clients hear none of that. When a firm goes quiet, someone else fills the gap, usually with rumour and assumption. In an industry built on trust between client and adviser, that silence is damaging.
The moment trust gets tested
Clients want to know whether the firm they have invested with will still be there when they retire, and whether their adviser will be too. Underneath, they are asking whether their money is safe. And they want to know before they have to ask.
The consolidation making this urgent is not slowing down. UK investment-sector deal value hit a record £19.7 billion in 2025, up 116% on the year before (MarshBerry). Oliver Wyman projects more than 1,500 significant transactions in global asset and wealth management by 2029, with around 20% of existing firms acquired.
The first 48 hours
I have been in the room when the announcement goes out, and the story tends to move faster outside the building than the plan does inside it. Within a day it is in client inboxes, whilst internally people are still agreeing what they are allowed to say. Within forty-eight hours it is in the FT, on LinkedIn, and in a client's WhatsApp group. Whoever fills that gap first sets the story, and it is rarely the firm.
The number the board should watch is attrition
Attrition is the number that decides whether a deal works. Oliver Wyman identifies attrition and talent retention as central risks in post-merger integration, alongside reputation and compliance. The work starts at signing. Whether the deal holds its value depends on what advisers and clients do next, and that turns almost entirely on what they hear, and how quickly.
Farrer & Co's guidance on UK wealth management acquisitions is direct: prioritise people and culture, identify key advisers early, map client concentration and retention risk, and structure the deal so the people who matter most buy into it. That is a retention and communications challenge as much as a legal one, which is why the plan cannot rest with legal and HR alone.
The client who hears nothing makes their own decisions
A client who hears nothing for three weeks does not wait patiently. They call their adviser, and if the adviser has no confident answer, that is the moment trust starts to erode. An adviser who senses the firm is not working to keep them starts taking calls from competitors. Multiply that across a book of clients and a team of advisers, and the cost is commercial, measured in assets under management leaving the firm.
After a deal completes, a firm can spend months looking inward. Leadership teams are merging, it is unclear who will lead what, and keeping clients and winning new business gets less attention than it should. For a time the firm loses momentum. A communications plan exists to prevent exactly that, and it works only if it is built alongside the deal itself.
This is why communications planning belongs in the room while the deal is still being done, running in parallel with due diligence. By the time the silence has gone on long enough to notice, the attrition it causes is already under way.
Are you ready when it happens?
With this much consolidation ahead, most firms will face a merger sooner or later. The question is whether the communications plan is ready before it is needed. A communications plan protects the value the deal was built on, in the weeks after the announcement when attention is elsewhere and that value is most easily lost.
If your firm is navigating a merger, or wondering what being ready would look like, let's talk.