“This is a really hot area of the industry, but it’s one that has challenges it needs to overcome to become all that it could be,” said The Wealth Mosaic’s founder Stephen Wall as he kicked off a special afternoon discussion event devoted to the future of the UK’s Managed Portfolio Solutions (MPS) market.
Hosted by The Wealth Mosaic, the 14 May event marked the beginning of a broader MPS-focused initiative that is set to include a research, editorial coverage, and dedicated intelligence hub focused on the MPS sector, and further events. Wall framed the discussion around three central questions: where is the MPS market today; what can the more mature US turnkey asset management platform (TAMP) market it teach it; and what role does technology need to play in the next phase of its development?
Rising growth, rising complexity
First of all, what are MPS? Annalise Toberman, Associate Research Director at Platforum, defined platform MPS as an outsourced investment management market: “model portfolios available on adviser platforms that are run by third-party asset or discretionary wealth managers,” distinguishing them from adviser-run portfolios or direct custody arrangements.
She outlined the scale and momentum of the market:
- UK MPS assets under management (AUM) reached £214 billion (US$285.5 billion) by the end of 2025.
- The market grew 24 percent year-on-year AUM growth, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28 percent.
- It now represents 27 percent of advised assets on adviser platforms – more than double its share five years ago.
- The number of MPS providers has now surpassed 250 and continues to grow rapidly.
Toberman highlighted the widening mix of participants entering the market, from traditional wealth managers and dedicated MPS firms through to investment consultants, platform operators and asset managers. Despite this influx, market concentration remains high, with the top 10 firms accounting for more than half of total assets.
Among the key trends she identified were adviser demand for hybrid active-passive portfolios, growing interest in retirement income and decumulation-focused solutions, and growing appetite for tailored or bespoke MPS arrangements between wealth managers and advisory firms.
“For wealth managers who find it hard to compete in a very crowded marketplace, you can build more strategic partnerships with tailored MPS – closer relationships, stickier assets. There are some firms in the market where this is pretty much all they’re doing.”
However, Toberman argued that rapid expansion has exposed significant operational weaknesses across the market, particularly around technology integration and platform fragmentation. MPS providers, she said, are often required to rebalance portfolios across large numbers of adviser platforms with inconsistent functionality and limited interoperability. “That’s a lot of man hours, a lot of manual processes, and no APIs to join everything nicely.”
She pointed to disparities between platforms in areas including ETF support, intraday trading, pre-funding capabilities, and fractional trading, arguing that these discrepancies can materially affect how model portfolios operate in practice.
Despite these issues, Toberman said providers continue to innovate through decumulation-focused portfolios, bucketing strategies, insured-product integrations, and greater use of fund structures to simplify execution and rebalancing.
Looking ahead, she forecast continued growth for the market, albeit at a slower pace as penetration increases, and predicted that tailored MPS relationships and retirement-focused solutions would become increasingly important. Platforum estimates the market could reach £500 billion (US$667 billion) by the end of 2030.
What TAMP can teach us
Scott MacKillop, a Consultant at SMacK Consulting, discussed the evolution of the US TAMP marketplace and its relevance to the UK MPS sector.
MacKillop, who entered the TAMP market in 1989, described TAMPs as platforms through which advisers can “outsource all aspects of their investment management”.
Early adoption in the US had been driven by advisers seeking more time, operational support, and access to specialist investment expertise, he said. But the model initially faced resistance from advisers concerned about costs, organisational change, and the belief that clients expected them to manage portfolios personally. That latter concern proved to be unfounded, MacKillop said, citing research conducted by Fidelity Labs. “In fact 90 percent of clients couldn’t care less who managed their money.”
He argued that the adviser value proposition in the US has fundamentally evolved since the 1990s, when advisers “were basically portfolio managers – that’s what they did, and they didn’t have a lot of other services that they offered”. Today, advisers increasingly position themselves around broader financial planning, estate planning, and behaviour coaching services. “The advisers who outsource have bigger, faster-growing businesses than the advisers who don’t,” he said.
He traced the TAMP market’s evolution from early separately managed account platforms to large-scale “technology TAMPs” capable of supporting hundreds of portfolios, strategists, and adviser-managed accounts. Current estimates place US TAMP asset in the US$2-3 trilliom range.
MacKillop also highlighted increasingly sophisticated capabilities emerging within the US market – including unified managed accounts, direct indexing, tax optimisation, and portfolio-level personalisation.
He suggested that alternative investments, operational processes enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), and integrated adviser technology stacks are likely to become increasingly significant. “The technology is improving,” he said. “As technologically savvy as they are now, these platforms will get even more so in the future.”
He noted that fee structures are also evolving, as large advisory firms put together portfolios called free models, as they don’t charge separate fees but instead derive their fee from internal expense ratios. “Access to the TAMP truly is free for the client other than the underlying expense ratio.”
The role of technology
The event concluded with a panel discussion on the operational realities of running MPS propositions across fragmented technology infrastructures, chaired by Wall and featuring Toberman and MacKillop alongside Andrew Tiley, Chief Risk & Proposition Officer at Fundment; Arianna Colombo, UK Operations Manager at of MDOTM; and Kendrick Wakeman, CEO of WealthTech Strategy Partners.
Tiley argued that operational practices had not evolved quickly enough despite the market’s rapid growth. Drawing on Fundment’s experience working with more than 70 MPS providers, he described a wide spectrum of operational maturity, ranging from firms fully integrated through APIs to others still sending spreadsheets by email. These, he said, are, “scarily, sometimes not encrypted in any way, shape, or form.”
Most providers sit in the middle of this spectrum, managing portfolios on their own systems and then logging into each platform separately.
Wakeman argued the technology to fix this already exists. “I think that technology is coming to the MPS market – people ought to ride that horse or they’ll be dragged by it.”
Colombo said fragmented workflows remain widespread across wealth and asset managers. She argued that scalable infrastructure would become increasingly important as firms attempt to personalise portfolios and deploy AI-driven processes. “Being able to leverage it to unlock true scalability and to have the right infrastructure to then build a business on – that is the key in this moment,” she said.
She also pointed to growing demand for automated portfolio reporting and commentary generation. “Writing commentaries is super time- and resource-intensive,” she said, adding that generative AI could help providers produce more personalised reporting at scale.
MacKillop argued that firms which own and control their own technology infrastructure ultimately gain a strategic advantage. “The firms that decided to build their own technology and sit on their own platforms paid a price for that,” he said. “But they’re the kings and queens now.”
He also cautioned against overengineering systems. “Just because you can build something doesn’t mean you should. You’re serving financial advisers who are not technology-oriented. Their goal in life is not to learn new technology. When you do develop technology, make it intuitive, so any knucklehead could figure it out.”
The panel also considered the regulatory aspect of MPS. “Compared to launching a fund, there’s not much regulatory hoop-jumping if you want to launch a model portfolio on the platform. So the barriers to entry have been very low – which is why you have this explosion of platforms, and so many boutiques being able to come to market.”
MacKillop said regulators in the US had continued to be relatively hands-off in the TAMP market. But Tiley predicted this wouldn’t last in the UK and that the sector would start attracting regulatory attention and even overreach eventually. The outstanding statistics Toberman had outlined in her presentation would by themselves attract regulatory attention, he predicted. “If you’re a regulator you see all the different client outcomes, costs, different ways of doing business, all the inefficiencies and therefore all the risk of harm – the regulator is going to have quite a time with this area.”
Wakeman said this will increase the importance of technology to the sector. “The higher the regulatory burden, the more valuable technology can be. All that documentation can happen automatically.”
Throughout the discussion, speakers repeatedly returned to the tension between rapid market expansion and the operational infrastructure required to support it. Although the UK MPS market continues to attract adviser demand, speakers suggested that future differentiation may increasingly depend on technology integration, scalability, customisation, and the ability to support more sophisticated portfolio structures across fragmented platform ecosystems.
Participate in our UK MPS project
The Wealth Mosaic will soon be addressing these challenges head-on and in-depth, through our UK MPS hub. A collaboration between TWM, Investment & Wealth Management Consultants (IAWMC), and WealthTech Strategy Partners, this project will mix dedicated knowledge and directory areas within the TWM website with a variety of events, bespoke research, insight reports, and a variety of content creation and publishing options to support knowledge sharing.
Elements of the project include:
- A series of MPS-focused events, with a focus on the technology and platform-fuelled future of the market
- An MPS Market Overview report that will profile the market, considering its size and shape, participants, products, platforms, and more
- Research including an annual UK MPS Annual Pulse project that will measure the ‘pulse’ of the market
- Content opportunities including articles, podcasts, and video interviews
- A UK MPS Theme area within our directory that will host all MPS-related content.
Want to find out more? Read our UK MPS Project Guide here, or to get involved contact us directly at office@thewealthmosaic.com
About The Wealth Mosaic
The Wealth Mosaic is a UK-headquartered online solution provider directory and knowledge resource, focused specifically on the wealth management industry.
For wealth managers, the buy side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic is designed to enable discovery of key solutions, solution providers and knowledge resources by specific business needs.
For solution providers and vendors, the sell side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic exists to support the positioning, exposure and business development needs of these firms in a more complex and demanding market.
For more information, visit: www.thewealthmosaic.com
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