There’s a moment early on with every new client where you must decide what kind of adviser you’re going to be. You can take the quick route: understand the immediate need, recommend a product, collect the fee, move on to the next introduction. Or you can take the slower, harder route: spend an extra meeting or two genuinely understanding a household’s situation, their goals, their fears, the things they haven’t thought to ask about yet, and build something that lasts.
I’ve come to believe the second approach is the only one with a future in this industry.
What an adviser’s fee buys a client varies enormously from firm to firm, and increasingly from adviser to adviser. If it only covers investment management, you’re in a commoditised, transactional business, and sooner or later a client will ask why they’re paying you rather than a low-cost platform. If it covers investment management and genuine financial planning, cash flow modelling, tax positioning, estate considerations, pension structuring across jurisdictions, there must be real substance behind the number, substance that justifies an ongoing relationship rather than a one-off sale.
Regulation has, in a roundabout way, pushed the industry toward this. Full annual reviews are now expected as standard practice across most regulated markets. That wasn’t always the case. For years, some advisers, particularly in cross-border and international markets, treated the initial sale as the finish line, then moved on to the next prospect rather than servicing the client they’d already won. That model is dying, and it should. A book of business built on acquisition alone, with no reinvestment in the clients already on the ledger, is not a sustainable business. It’s a treadmill.
Advising clients across multiple jurisdictions rather than a single domestic market changes the equation considerably. On one hand, it’s a genuine business risk: you cannot control what happens to a client’s residency, tax status, or immigration position for political, geopolitical or economic reasons entirely outside your influence. People are moving more freely than they used to, and that trend has only accelerated since the pandemic. Every year, a meaningful number of clients leave the UK, and if you’re only licensed to advise domestically, that’s a relationship you simply can’t continue.
That’s not just an inconvenience for the firm. It’s a real problem for the client. If an adviser can’t legally continue advising someone who’s relocated, and that person tries to keep their existing arrangement quietly running in the background, it tends to catch up with them, often at the worst possible moment. A pension provider runs its own KYC checks and finds no UK address on file. A US custodian discovers the client no longer has a US address and can’t continue servicing the account. Suddenly there are restrictions on money that isn’t even the adviser’s problem to fix, but very much is the client’s problem to live with.
This is precisely why being licensed across multiple major jurisdictions, in my case the UK, the US, Europe and the Middle East, matters so much for clients whose lives genuinely span borders. It isn’t always the same adviser handling every element; often it’s a case of working in tandem with colleagues licensed in the relevant market. But the client experiences continuity rather than a service cliff-edge the moment their passport stamps change.
From a professional standpoint, this is also, frankly, a more interesting way to practise. Constant change in regulation and legislation keeps you learning rather than coasting. It’s where the more complex, higher-value cases live, households whose needs span two, three or four jurisdictions simultaneously, and it’s where ongoing advice earns its keep most clearly. It’s also, candidly, where client relationships become genuinely durable: once someone has found an adviser who can service their situation properly across borders, replacing that relationship is not a trivial exercise.
None of that is an excuse for complacency, though. If we stop delivering service, clients have every right to leave; cross-border capability buys you nothing if the fundamentals aren’t there. That’s why we invest heavily not just in licensing and technical capability but in technology that gives clients full visibility of their own money, wherever in the world they happen to be. No one should be waiting for a quarterly statement to land in the post or juggling five logins across five custodians to understand what they actually own. A single, secure view, accessible like a bank account, whenever a client wants to check in, means they don’t need to speak to us every month to feel in control. When something does need attention, the conversation happens because it matters, not because a statement finally arrived.
That, ultimately, is what separates a relationship from a transaction: the client trusts you’re paying attention even when they’re not asking you to.
Ravi Gill is a senior financial adviser at Hoxton Wealth and won the International Young Talent of the Year award at the International Adviser Global Financial Services Awards 2026
