Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher are back around the SoapBox, and this week they have not one guest but two: Victoria Hicks, CEO of Melo, and Gaynor Rigby, COO of Melo. What follows is a fast, funny and genuinely divided conversation that moves from the boardroom to the tax system, taking in why women build some of the best firms in the profession but rarely the biggest, whether the so-called advice gap is really an advice gap at all, and the uncomfortable question of whether Britain is quietly taxing its wealth creators out of the country.
Adviser 3.0 is funding five tickets to the Empowering Excellence Conference & Awards 2026 in London. Enter before entries close.
Women Build Better, Men Build Bigger
Vicki opens by lifting the discussion above financial services and onto investment itself. Follow the private equity money, she argues, and you find that the capital funding the businesses of the future flows overwhelmingly to all-male boards, with only a sliver reaching all-female ones. Look at privately owned firms and a pattern emerges that she is careful not to overstate: on balance, women tend to run the better businesses, while men tend to run the bigger ones.
For Gaynor, part of the answer sits in the language the profession uses about the people running these firms.
"Men get labelled ambitious and outspoken. Women with the same characteristics get labelled bossy and uncompromising."
The case study running underneath the whole discussion is Amber River, the consolidator Mary Anne McIntyre built from a business plan to a billion-pound valuation in a handful of years, largely out of the public eye. That invisibility is the sticking point for Abraham, who argues that role models only work if people can actually see them. Vicki's own line on merit is blunt: she does not want a seat at any table because she makes up a number. The fix the panel keeps returning to is not quotas but visibility and mentoring, getting the advisers who have already built and sold firms to pass on what they know, not just their client banks.
The Advice Gap Row
From there the conversation turns to the news. Vanguard has switched on a targeted support service that walks first-time investors through a few questions and points them towards a fund, and JP Morgan is quietly retiring the Nutmeg brand it has never managed to make pay. Abraham's read is that serving the mass market this way is a game for deep-pocketed giants, not for personalised planning firms, and he is relaxed about the competition. Call him a capitalist, he says, but that is the reality of the game.
The real fight is over qualifications. With the regulator floating a lighter Level 2 route to bring more people into advice, Vicki makes the case that the bar should be proportionate to the advice being given, and that a lower rung could become the training ground the banks and building societies used to provide. Abraham will not have it, and reaches for the analogy that ends the argument.
"Would you like to be treated by a Level 2 qualified doctor?"
Matt plays peacemaker from the fence and lands what might be the sharpest reframe of the episode. The thing most people are missing, he argues, is not regulated advice at all, but guidance, coaching and support. So call it what it actually is.
"It isn't an advice gap. It's a help gap."
The Millionaire Exodus
The last topic is the one that gets Abraham most animated. The Adam Smith Institute's latest Millionaire Tracker puts the number of sterling millionaires in Britain at 442,000, the lowest since the 2008 financial crisis and down from a peak of more than a million in 2021. The think tank pins the fall on weaker real asset prices, low savings and, most provocatively, wealthy people leaving over tax, the end of the non-dom regime and what it calls a culture hostile to wealth creators.
Matt is not so quick to swallow it. He remembers an earlier millionaire-exodus scare that turned out to rest on an expat firm counting names on LinkedIn, and he points out that the Sunday Times Rich List and the Adam Smith Institute, both leaning on the same official data, land four-fold apart. His rule of thumb is to follow the funding behind any think tank before you trust its headline. What neither of them can find, Abraham counters, is any data proving the opposite.
"Find me data that shows we're not losing people to this."
Abraham, who arrived in this country twenty years ago with three hundred pounds and a decent command of English, says the mood around building something has curdled, and that every trip abroad now seems to end with an email inviting him to move his business somewhere friendlier. Vicki widens it into the tax system itself, drawing a hard line between earned income and passive wealth, and arguing that the country needs to earn its way to growth rather than tax its way there.