UK wealth giant Quilter is refunding customers who paid for advice they never received
Key Points
- Quilter is refunding customers charged for ongoing financial advice they may never have received.
- The exercise covers fees paid between 2018 and 2023 through firms in the Quilter Financial Planning network.
- Refunds include the fees themselves plus interest at Financial Ombudsman Service rates.
- Quilter has £30 million set aside and expects to pay most of it by 30 June 2027.
- The company is inviting affected customers to join the review directly.
Quilter has started refunding customers whose advisers charged them ongoing fees for a service they cannot prove they delivered.
The London-listed wealth manager has set aside £30 million for the exercise, which covers people who paid ongoing advice charges between 2018 and 2023 through firms in the Quilter Financial Planning network – advice businesses that trade under Quilter’s regulatory umbrella rather than as part of the company itself.
Quilter set out the latest position in its half-year results on Thursday (6 August).
The exercise traces back to the Financial Conduct Authority’s scrutiny of whether advisers actually delivered the ongoing service customers paid for year after year.
Quilter appointed an independent reviewer in June 2024 to examine practices across the network between January 2017 and December 2023, and submitted the final report to the regulator in the first half of 2025. It then built a remediation plan around the findings.
How the refunds work
Quilter is contacting the customers it judges most likely to have missed out and inviting them to join the review if they believe they did not get the ongoing advice they paid for.
Where an adviser cannot satisfactorily evidence that the service happened, the customer gets their fees back plus interest at the rate the Financial Ombudsman Service applies.
Quilter can then seek reimbursement from the appointed representative firm that took the revenue.
Quilter paid £1 million to customers in the first six months of 2026 and spent £6 million running the process, having remediated nobody at all during 2025 while it designed the scheme.
The pot stood at £42 million at the end of December and now sits at £30 million, after Quilter trimmed £5 million from its estimate as case reviews came in.
Almost all of the remaining money is due to go out within a year, with redress calculated and paid over the 12 months to 30 June 2027.
Quilter cautions that the final bill could land materially higher or lower, because it still does not know how many customers will respond to the invitation or what proportion of files will turn out to lack evidence of service.
