We're building a new financial advice firm, and we want to meet advisers

We've been quietly building Towpath, a new financial advice firm, over the past year. This is the first time we're writing publicly about it, as we now want to meet the very best advisers in the UK.

As a new firm aiming to raise the bar on what financial advice looks like, we've come across a number of interesting topics, debates and challenges. Things like how you'd measure peace of mind, how many customers one adviser can genuinely care for, and new ways to assess attitude to risk. Over the coming months, we'll be writing about the ones we think are most useful for advisers.

If you read any of our blogs and find yourself nodding, we'd love to hear from you, learn from you, and get to know you. Feel free to email us at [email protected].

Our point of view

We're three founders who together built Otta. Our mission there was to make job search less soul-crushing, and we grew it to over 2 million users in the UK and US before being acquired in 2024. We don't come from financial advice, so we've spent the last year learning the industry in depth. Two of us have passed the Level 4 Financial Planning exams. We've spent hundreds of hours with people with advisers, people without advisers, firm owners, consolidators, supervision experts and compliance experts. Long enough to know how it works, not long enough to have stopped questioning the status quo.

We admire the depth of the relationships that advisers build with their customers. And yet a lot of how the industry operates hasn't evolved in decades. The customer has changed, the technology has changed, and the ownership of firms is changing. It's an unusual and exciting moment to be building from scratch.

We chose to build the firm, not the software for other firms, so we can fundamentally change the experience. With our background in technology, we're able to explore new ways of running a firm and new opportunities to delight customers. So far we've built the first version of our technology that shakes up how to advise customers on excellent retirement recommendations. We'll start advising our first customers in 2027.

Our aim is to build a nationwide brand for the big money decisions in life, and get many more people to engage with advice. We believe that begins with helping with much more than an investment allocation, and leaning into the messiness and difficulty of making money decisions.

Doing that takes a certain kind of adviser. The ones who got into this for the planning, not the products. Who'd rather ask the harder question than give the easier answer. Who want their work measured by whether the customer sleeps better, not by funds under management.

You've probably noticed the same things we have. The customer who came in to ask whether they can retire, and the hour went on fund performance. The fact-find that captures every policy number and never asks how they actually feel about money. The customer who says "I should have come years ago", and you wonder how many never came at all. A firm you liked working for getting bought, and the things that made it good quietly going.

There'll be a lot more storytelling when we do our public launch to customers at some point next year. But for now, we're writing for advisers, and we hope you find it useful to follow along.