The fourth quarter saw gross inflows of £20.44bn, a rise of 0.16% from Q3 2021.

Total market assets under administration finished 2021 up 4.99% to reach just under £735bn, according to the latest date from the lang cat.

The advised portion of assets under advice rose 3.66% to reach £583bn.

Rich Mayor, senior analyst at the lang cat, said: “Back in 2017 a number of platforms registered over £2bn in gross sales but since DB flows dried up in 2019, no platform had broken this milestone again until 2021 (we won’t talk about 2020…).

“There is a wider question of whether we’re starting to see the bigger players in the advised platform cohort pulling away from the rest of the group? Historically, around 60-65% of gross sales would go to the top seven platforms in our data tables – representing around 60% of advised assets. And in Q4, 68% of new business went to this top seven which, though a modest increase, is the largest share for the past few years.

“This is significant because during the pandemic we recorded a more even distribution of sales across advised platforms, as many smaller/specialist platforms demonstrated their agility in terms of servicing customers and advisers compared to larger established platforms. However, it now seems that the status quo is being restored – for now, at least.”

The platform with the highest advised channel assets under administration in the fourth quarter of 2021 was abrdn with £76.18bn, closely followed by Quilter at £73.17bn.

Quilter was the highest ranked platform for advised channel gross inflows with £2.3bn, followed by abrdn with £2.25bn.

The platform with the highest advised channel net inflows for the quarter was Aviva Platform with £1.44bn, followed by True Potential with £1.32bn and Transact with £1.29bn.