Brewin Dolphin is withdrawing investment advice services for clients with less than £50,000 in investable assets due to the costs of servicing these clients becoming unsustainable.

Brewin Dolphin is withdrawing
investment advice services for clients with less than £50,000 ($81,000) in investable
assets due to the costs of servicing these clients becoming unsustainable.

The decision to axe the investment services comes after the
implementation of the Retail Distribution Review, which has priced consumers
out of receiving independent financial advice by making it uneconomical for
IFAs and wealth managers to deal with lower net worth clients.

Brewin Dolphin said that it recognised the advice gap
created by the RDR was real and had opened up faster than many had expected,
making the cost of offering financial advice to clients with less than £50,000
"unsustainably high".

Clients affected by the changes are being contacted by the
firm and offered execution-only portfolios as an alternative.

"We are now reacting to this change in client needs by
re-focussing our proposition and resources around helping more people with
their money on a discretionary basis," said Stephen Ford, head of
investment management at Brewin Dolphin.

"We are still committed to our existing clients who
decide to stay with an advisory service and we are also simplifying our proposition
by withdrawing some other outdated and less suitable services such as
certificated accounts and portfolios with less that £50,000," said
Ford.

In other news, Brewin
Dolphin has appointed Paul Wilson as a non-executive director.

In a career spanning
over 25 years, Wilson
has been a leader of
several professional services businesses and is currently a non-executive director
of Abbey Protection and an advisory partner at Bain & Company, where he was
previously a senior partner.