A million dreams - or maybe several hundred - were made at London's iconic National History Museum last night as guests celebrated their achievements at the FT Adviser Financial Adviser Service Awards.
Now in their 33rd year, the prestigious awards ceremony - the highlight of the financial services calendar - started as it meant to go on, with a warm welcome of mulled wine and live music as guests enjoyed pre-dinner drinks while admiring the museum's exhibits.
There was a brief welcome note from FT Adviser editor Simoney Kyriakou, focusing on advisers' changing perception of service levels amid the run-up to consumer duty.
Despite references to weird statistics, such as the fact that 12 elephants can be squeezed into a blue whale, there was an exhortation to continue to deliver great service to advisers in the years ahead.
Guests were then treated to a delicious dinner before being completely dazzled by a medley of songs from The Greatest Showman, which almost raised the roof on the historic Hintze Hall.
After a brilliant stand-up routine by the award-winning comedian and author Nathan Caton, who pointed out the obvious - 'This is the Financial Adviser Service Awards, but there are no advisers here. What's going on?' - the evening rolled into the awards presentations, finishing up with the fabulous Ronnie Scott's Rejects, playing us into the wee small hours.
This year saw newcomers such as Triple Point burst onto the scene, straight into the charts with five stars, while long-standing five-star winners such as Just and Royal London celebrated significant achievements, receiving special awards - Outstanding Achievement and Company of the Year respectively.
As an example, this year, Royal London saw its 15th consecutive five-star award for pensions service, while its protection arm saw it receive its 10th consecutive five-star rating.
While service levels in general had fallen noticeably in some categories, such as investments and platforms, and some companies fell from five to four or even three stars over the course of 2022-2023, advisers still voted in their thousands for those providers who had really made the effort to turn things around.
To read the full list of all our five-star winners, keep an eye out at 12 noon for our special Awards report, which will also contain a video of the evening's highlights and photos from the spectacular event.
The methodology
Following adviser feedback in 2022, we implemented four new stages to make sure all votes can be verified.
1) On the form we already ask 'Are you authorised?' and then ask for name, company, FCA number and email address. We now ask for their job title, to see who is voting, and how senior they are.
We got Coredata to send all that data to us, and we manually compared names against our database to see if people who are voting matched up with our own database and the FCA register. This was one way to qualify the survey data.
