Most of the conversation around the pension IHT changes has focused on clients. In our interviews, we discovered firms that are using this moment to rethink the shape of the business itself.

“We worked out we needed 15% growth just to stand still, because of withdrawals and deaths.” Advice firm, NextWealth Organic Growth research 2025

Ask an adviser what keeps them awake at night and the answer is rarely markets, regulation, or even AI. Increasingly, it’s something much simpler – clients are getting older.

As one adviser put it to us: “I think like lots of IFA firms, probably our biggest risk to the business is clients dying and assets just disappearing.” That’s when the assets that a firm has looked after for decades are most likely to leave it: perhaps the surviving spouse moves to someone else, the children take their inheritance to pay off the mortgage and years of carefully built value walks out the door.

Assets flow out through withdrawals as clients draw down in retirement and out through estates as they pass away, so every firm is already replacing what leaves as a matter of course, whatever its ambitions on size.

Our Organic Growth research last year put a number on quite how much. One firm had done the maths and found it needed 15% growth a year simply to match what was naturally flowing out. It’s a reality every advice business is already managing, whether or not they’ve run the numbers.

The 2027 inheritance tax change on pensions brings that backdrop to the surface.

Why this change makes it urgent

From April 2027, unused pensions fall within the scope of inheritance tax. The conversation that creates is becoming well-rehearsed: the shock, the reversal of twenty years of ‘shelter it in the pension,’ the emotional work of helping clients spend and gift.

Alongside those client conversations sits another story – what this means for advice firms themselves.

Bringing pensions into the estate makes the wealth transfer bigger and more visible. The next generation is now unavoidably part of the plan. And the right advice for some clients will be encouraging spending and gifting, accelerating the natural outflow that firms are already working hard each year to replace.

For some firms we interviewed, the answer is to redesign around the whole family balance sheet, rather than individual clients’ portfolios.

Bringing the pieces in-house

One response has been to bring more services under one roof, so the relationship doesn’t fracture when it matters most.

One firm started years ago with an in-house will writer, added a lawyer and legal executives as demand grew, and is now building towards probate and estate administration.

Another has taken it further, assembling advice, discretionary management, an in-house accountancy arm and a regulated legal practice under one roof. Tax returns come as part of the service; the whole family is grouped together and priced on a scale that tiers down as assets grow. Once a firm holds the will, the trust, the tax return and the investments, a client struggles to see the point of keeping anything elsewhere and there’s no loose thread for a beneficiary to pull.

Building a firm that outlives its founder

Other firms are applying estate-planning discipline to themselves.

One business owner has placed the majority of his firm’s shares into two family trusts, specifically to take a future sale off the table. It’s tax and succession planning for the business, but it also lets him make a promise he can keep: “We will look after you until the day you die. And then we’ll continue to look after your family.”

It’s a contrast with a consolidating market, and these advisers drew it deliberately. A firm structured to endure can offer continuity as a genuine differentiator, which is exactly what a family navigating a wealth transfer is looking for.

The advisers the next generation will actually talk to

Of course, none of this works if the people delivering the advice don’t connect with the people inheriting the wealth. Several firms have concluded that engaging the next generation is as much about who’s in the room as what’s said, growing their own younger advisers and pairing them with younger family members. As one MD asked, only half rhetorically: why would a nineteen-year-old sit and take financial advice from someone forty years their senior?

Combined with early groundwork – Junior ISAs, pensions opened for clients’ children, keeping the family grouped from the start – the firm is positioned to inherit the relationship, not just the assets.

The real shift

The firms getting ahead of April 2027 aren’t just rewriting their client conversations. Many are reshaping their businesses around families, thinking across generations and asking what else it takes to keep relationships for the long term.

This is one of the findings from The Headlines That Matter, a NextWealth guide in partnership with Quilter on how advice firms are responding to the 2027 inheritance tax changes. Read the full report.