Fairstone, one of the UK’s largest Chartered Financial Planning firms, today announces that Bankfield Financial Advisers (pictured) and South West Financial Planning, have been fully acquired by the business.
The two purchases further highlight the strength of Fairstone’s proprietary Downstream Buy Out model, which reverses the traditional buy-and-build approach in integrating ambitious IFA firms into the group.
The deals mark a total of four outright acquisitions so far this year for the full-service wealth management house, building on Fairstone’s ethos of delivering integration-led growth.
Leicester-based Bankfield and Devon-based SWFP both specialise in holistic financial planning and wealth management.
The deals bring an additional 2,700 clients into the group together with 12 advisers and seven support staff; the acquisition also secures gross fee income of £1.5 million for Fairstone, together with funds under management of more than £120m.
Lee Hartley, CEO of Fairstone, said:
“We are delighted to complete the final acquisitions of Bankfield and South West Financial Planning, having worked closely with them through our proprietary DBO programme.
“Fairstone places a focus on firms with an appetite to grow and develop and this is an ambition shared by both Bankfield and SWFP.
“We are delighted to finalise these two deals and bring two further respected businesses into the group.”
Company principal at Bankfield, Naren Naik, said: “Having been in the business for some 44 years and been a senior member of the corporate team at AIG, I realised many years ago, an organisation is only as good as its people.
“Having spent time with the most senior members of Fairstone I was satisfied that these were people I could trust to honour their commitment to do the best for my clients and staff. I am pleased to say that the trust was well founded.”
Company principal at South West Financial Planning Ltd, David Roberts, said: “The Directors of SWFP Ltd wanted to enhance the service offering available to our clients by tapping into the additional resources available to a national firm of independent advisers such as Fairstone.”
