Writing in August about February to April carries an advantage the trade press never had at the time: the half-year numbers are now published, so the spring can be set against actual data rather than sentiment. It also carries an obligation, which is to be honest about how little three months of a private market can be proven from aggregate figures. This retrospective tries to do both.
The backdrop the numbers give us
The most useful published measure of the period arrived in July. EY's analysis of UK financial services M&A, published on Mon 6th Jul 2026, counted 61 wealth and asset management deals in the first half of 2026, up from 47 in the first half of 2025. Disclosed deal value moved from £0.2bn to £22.7bn over the same comparison. Across the whole of UK financial services, deal count rose from 108 to 135 and disclosed value from £4.2bn to £33.7bn.
Two things about those figures matter before anything is read into them. First, they cover six months, not three; February to April sits inside the H1 window but cannot be separated out from it. Second, disclosed value is a poor guide to what a typical advice firm sold for, because a small number of very large transactions dominate the total. A £22.7bn disclosed figure says more about the presence of institutional-scale deals in the half than it does about the price achieved by a two-adviser firm with £80m of FUM. The count, 61 deals against 47 a year earlier, is the more honest signal for owners: activity was up, meaningfully, and the spring was part of that.
EY's own commentary described wealth and asset management as one of the most active areas of high-value M&A in UK financial services, with investors drawn to the sector's long-term growth potential. That reads as a buyer's-market observation, but in practice it described a seller's environment: capital wanting to be deployed into a sector with a limited supply of good firms.
What the multiple picture looked like
On pricing, the best available published series remains Gunner & Co's analysis, which put the average recurring-income multiple at 4.2x in the first half of 2025, up from a stable level of roughly 3.5x across 2023 and 2024, and the highest point since 2018. The drivers identified were competition for well-prepared firms and the pricing clarity that followed Consumer Duty implementation, once buyers could see which firms had done the work and which had not.
That figure predates the spring under review, and it is worth being precise about that. Published multiple data lags the market by months; a deal that completed in March 2026 was typically priced in the autumn of 2025 and negotiated through the winter. What can be said is that nothing in the H1 2026 activity data suggests the conditions behind that rise, more buyers than well-prepared sellers, reversed during the spring. The average is also exactly that: an average. It sits within a wide range, and the mechanics of where an individual firm lands within a range are covered in recurring income multiples explained.
The word doing the work in Gunner & Co's finding is "well-prepared". The spring did not reward firms for existing; it rewarded firms whose recurring income was evidenced, whose client data was clean, and whose books stood up to inspection. The gap between what a prepared firm and an unprepared firm achieved was, by most accounts from those advising on deals, wider than the gap between the 2024 average and the 2025 average.
What the quarter felt like for sellers
Aggregate data describes the market; it does not describe the experience of selling into it. Three features of the spring came through consistently from owners who were in a process during those months.
The first was genuine competition for the right firms. A directly authorised firm with a clean regulatory history, an evidenced recurring income stream and a client bank that was not concentrated in its oldest decade could expect more than one credible expression of interest, and sometimes several. That competition showed up less in headline multiples than in structure: better cash-at-completion proportions, shorter earn-out periods, more negotiable warranty caps. Sellers with options negotiated terms, not just price.
The second was pricing discipline. The buyers active through the spring, and the categories of buyer in the market in 2026 are covered separately, were not paying up indiscriminately. Private-equity-backed consolidators in particular arrived with investment committees, defined return hurdles and a clear view of what integration would cost them. An asking price built on hope rather than evidence did not get argued down; it got declined. The market was strong and selective at the same time, and owners who read the strength without the selectivity were the ones disappointed.
The third was longer diligence. This is the least visible feature in any published data and the most consistently reported. The FCA's multi-firm review of consolidation, published on Fri 31st Oct 2025, had set out its concerns about poorly managed integration and about debt-funded acquisition structures, and by the spring its effect on buyer behaviour was plain. Buyers were examining file quality, ongoing service evidence and redress exposure with more care, because their own regulator had told them the risks of acquired books now sat firmly on their desks. A diligence phase that might have run eight weeks in 2023 commonly ran longer in spring 2026, and requests for underlying evidence, not just summaries, became standard. What that review means for a seller's own preparation is covered in what the FCA's consolidation review means if you are selling.
A fourth feature deserves a mention, though it is harder to evidence: the persistence of the structural gap between routes. Owners weighing a conventional share sale against a structured asset sale to a national acquirer found that gap unchanged through the spring. The share sale route offered a capital sum against recurring income; the structured route offered retained income commonly running many months, with a different risk and tax profile. Neither route got obviously better or worse over the quarter, but the lengthening of diligence affected them unevenly, because the structured route typically involves novation of client agreements rather than the full corporate examination a share purchase demands.
None of this made the spring a bad time to sell. It made it a demanding one. The firms that moved through it quickly were those whose data rooms were ready before the first meeting, a preparation question rather than a market one.
What three months of aggregate data cannot tell you
It would be easy to dress 61 deals and £22.7bn up as a verdict on the spring. Honesty requires the opposite. The limits of the data are worth stating plainly, because most market commentary quietly ignores them.
- The EY figures are a six-month total; the February to April share of them is unknown and unknowable from the published analysis.
- Disclosed value excludes the many small transactions where no price is announced, which is most of the market an ordinary firm owner actually sells into.
- Deal counts record completions, not agreements; a deal counted in March was usually agreed months earlier, so the figures describe an earlier market than their dates suggest.
- Average multiples compress a wide range into one number and say nothing about structure: an identical headline multiple can be mostly cash or mostly deferred consideration at risk.
- No aggregate series captures the deals that fell over in diligence, which is where the real story of buyer selectivity lives.
There is also a survivorship problem in how spring markets get remembered. The deals that completed are the ones commentators can count; the approaches that went nowhere, the heads of terms that lapsed, and the firms that tested the market and withdrew leave no trace in any dataset. An owner who heard through the spring that "everything is selling" was hearing about the numerator without the denominator. The honest position is that nobody, including the buyers themselves, holds a complete picture of how many processes started against how many finished.
The right way to use the aggregate data, then, is directional. Activity rose. Capital remained committed to the sector. Pricing for well-prepared firms held at or near its strongest level in years, on the most recent published evidence. Diligence lengthened and deepened under regulatory attention. Each of those statements survives contact with the data's limitations; a claim that "multiples in March were X" would not.
What the spring suggests for owners looking ahead
For an owner reading this in August 2026 with a sale one to three years away, the spring's lesson is not about timing the market. It is that the market now pays for preparation and charges for the lack of it. Competition concentrated on firms that were ready; diligence punished firms that were not; and the spread between the two outcomes was wider than any movement in the average.
That points to work an owner controls entirely: evidencing recurring income, cleaning client data, documenting ongoing service delivery, and understanding the exposure a buyer's diligence team will look for. The broader market picture, including who the buyers are and how they behave, sits in the rest of the market pillar, and the preparation side is its own body of work. The spring rewarded firms that had started early.
If you want a number of your own to set against all of this, the free IFA valuation calculator gives you a range for your firm and shows the assumptions behind it.