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Analysis of Financial Network Performance for the whole of 2011

Well, it's 2012, a new year and I would like to give my heartfelt congratulations to everyone who has survived 2011 which was a bit brutal, although maybe not quite as traumatic as 2010.  Many of us have now started to develop strategies to cope with the dire economic condition of the UK at the minute and it would seem that most lenders have also began to realise that however cautious they need to be, at the end of the day they are banks and need to lend money to survive.  The government has brought out "another" new initiative to help first time buyers based loosely on a state backed Mortgage Indemnity Guarantee (MIG) I definitely think this is a step in the right direction.  Although in all fairness, I'm hardly unbiased in this matter since I've been bleating on about reintroducing MIG's for at least 2 years now.

Turning our attention to the figures, please remember these figures give AR numbers from the FSA register and as such are a good yardstick for tracking industry trends but can't really be used for a deep analysis of individual companies as they don't show actual "adviser" numbers or the profitability of a network.  Keeping that in mind, the overall totals show a reduction of 249 in AR firms over the year which given the hits that the financial sector has endured, including the difficulty currently experienced in actually getting a lot of mortgages placed is really a testament to the tenacity, business acumen and flexibility of mortgage brokers and other financial advisers in keeping their businesses running with what has been a very damaged system.  

Something new with this table is we've also added a percentage change column in an effort to help get some sort of proportion on the figures and also enable individual network performances to be checked against the overall table totals.

Biggest loser, nothing to do with the TV show, in terms of AR totals is Sesame with a reduction of 85 firms.  Although such is the size of the firm that they still top the network list.  Lime, Connect, and Connect Services, the three components of the Tenet group appear as the second biggest losers, down 52 AR's but some of this is possibly due to internal administrative changes and restructuring.

Biggest winner is Lighthouse with an increase of 49 AR's over the year, that's up an impressive 25%, however around 32 of these who came through in December seem to be the result of a mass signing from Financial Services Advice and Support Ltd.  Next best growth could be attributed to another giant PTFS with an increase of 26 AR's, or 2.61% or the much more modest Stonebridge with an increase of 17 AR's which in percentage terms is 25.37%.  That's the beauty of statistics, you pays your money and you takes your choice, and don't even get me started on the size of the marketing budgets some networks expend on attracting new brokers.  This is why it's always policy to take professional advice before changing or joining a network.  But to be fair, if it were possible to compare networks with a simple table, then Which Network as a consultancy wouldn't exist and I might be selling statues made from sea shells for a living on a beach in the Bahamas, now there's a thought?

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