How marketing agencies can offer financial-advice referrals without becoming regulated

An agency retainer buys more than campaigns. It buys quarterly conversations about revenue targets, margins and where the founder wants the business to be in five years. Somewhere around year two of a good client relationship, the mask slips: 'Between us, I want to sell before I'm fifty.' Or: 'There's £400k sitting in the company and I haven't paid into a pension since 2019.'

These confessions are a compliment. They are also a trap for the well-meaning. Marketing people are professional opinion-havers, and the temptation to offer one — about pensions, about extracting profit, about what to do with sale proceeds — is real.

Resist it. Not because your instincts are bad, but because in the UK that opinion has a legal classification, and it is not in your favour.

Advising on investments and pensions is a regulated activity under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Doing it without FCA authorisation is a criminal offence — full stop, no exemption for creative industries or for advice given kindly over lunch. What is not regulated is making an introduction: connecting your client to an authorised financial adviser without recommending any product or course of action.

So the compliant repertoire is small and sturdy:

• Listen fully. Founders rarely get to say this stuff out loud.
• Say clearly that this needs a regulated financial adviser.
• Offer a named introduction to one you have checked on the FCA Register.
• Stop there. No product talk, no 'what I'd do'.

Four steps. The fourth is the hard one.

Agencies obsess over churn, and rightly — losing a £5,000-a-month retainer hurts. Clients leave agencies they see as suppliers; they stay with agencies they see as infrastructure. Connecting a founder with an adviser who sorts their pension neglect or maps their exit makes you infrastructure. It is the cheapest loyalty programme you will ever run.

Then there is the fee. Introducer arrangements are lawful when disclosed: tell the client in writing, before the handover, that you may receive a payment and roughly what it is, and confirm they are free to use anyone. Keep the adviser agreement in writing too — trigger, amount, timing. Referral platforms such as SmartPeer handle the tracking and generate the disclosure letter for every introduction, which keeps the admin close to zero.

One founder conversation, properly routed, can outearn a month of paid social. Nobody puts that in the case studies. They should.