UK wealth management giant St James’s Place “paused” enrolment into its advice academy during last year.
The company made the announcement during its Q4 2020 results, for the three months ending 31 December 2020.
A spokesperson for SJP, however, confirmed to International Adviser that the pause has now lifted, so the academy is recruiting again for its next intake.
SJP currently has 2,540 partner businesses (2,564 in 2019) and 4,338 qualified advisers, up from 4,271 in 2019.
Andrew Croft, chief executive at SJP, said: “Sensitive to the challenging external environment for many financial advice businesses across the UK, we decided to slow the pace of our experienced adviser recruitment activity and paused the intake of new ‘students’ to our academy programme during the year.
“Despite this, continued strong adviser retention coupled with modest recruitment resulted in net adviser growth to 4,338 advisers.”
Results
During its results, SJP reported £2.3bn ($3.14bn, €2.6bn) of net inflows during the last quarter of 2020, from £2.44bn in Q4 2019.
At the end of December, funds under management (FuM) stood at £129.3bn, an 11% increase over the 12-month period (2019: £117bn).
Gross inflows for Q4 2020 totalled £4.02bn, a growth of 1% against the same period in 2019.
Croft added: “Whilst the current lockdown restrictions remain in place, the operating environment will continue to be challenging.
“However, the quality of the partnership and the strength of our client proposition, together with the resilience of the St James’s Place community, underpins our confidence in the medium to long-term growth prospects of our business.”
