Annual reviews are a compliance obligation, not a commercial activity. For the majority of long-tail clients, the review generates no new business. The adviser spends 60 to 90 minutes on preparation, the call, and the file note. The client pays £300 to £600 per year. The unit economics are negative.
The cost breakdown
Take a firm with 200 clients in the long-tail segment. Each adviser-led review takes 90 minutes including preparation, the meeting, and file administration. At a fully loaded adviser cost of £100 to £150 per hour, that is £150 to £225 per review.
200 reviews at £150 each is £30,000. At £225, it is £45,000. For firms with 500 or more long-tail clients, the annual cost of adviser-led reviews runs into six figures.
This cost delivers no incremental revenue. It protects existing fees, but only if the review is actually conducted. If it is not conducted, the fee is at risk under Consumer Duty. Either way, the firm loses.
Why internal hires do not solve it
Some firms hire paraplanners or client services staff to conduct reviews. This reduces the per-review cost but introduces fixed overhead. You are paying a salary whether reviews are happening or not. If the hire leaves, you are back to square one. Recruitment, training, and ramp-up cost time and money.
The other problem is regulatory. An internal hire needs to be competent, supervised, and operating within your compliance framework. This is not a task you can hand to a generalist.
The outsourced model
Pillar charges per review. No salary, no fixed cost, no platform licence. Our relationship managers work inside your Intelliflo instance, following your processes, under your compliance framework. You pay for the reviews that happen.
The per-review cost is a fraction of an adviser-led review. The 90% of reviews that require no adviser involvement are handled entirely by Pillar. The 10% that surface something material are escalated to your adviser with full context and a briefing note.
For most firms, the ROI comes from three places: lower review costs, retained ongoing fees that would otherwise be at regulatory risk, and revenue from escalated cases. In our pilot, the combination delivered a 2.4x return within 8 weeks.
What to do next
Calculate the cost of your current review programme. Include adviser time, administration, and the opportunity cost of pulling advisers away from revenue-generating work. Then compare it to a per-review outsourced model. The numbers speak for themselves.