Phil Billingham CFPCM and Susan Jordan from The Phil Billingham Partnership presented the accredited firms' benchmarking survey – 12 months on.

Mr Billingham said there were a number of positives, with encouraging signs shown in certain areas marked out in last year's report as needing to be better.

Annual turnover growth in the last accounting year showed similar levels among accredited firms to the previous report.

But Ms Jordan stressed the figures were significantly higher than for general advice firms, looking at a recent APFA survey.

Profitability per head is roughly twice as high as that of a general advice firm, she told delegates.

Summarising the findings, Mr Billingham said: "Accredited firms are evolving, it's evolution not revolution, there's improvement in growth, profitability and self analysis, there's some key metrics with definite improvements, there's no question about that.

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He said there had been more structured marketing work but marketing was generally passive and reactive, rather than pro-active.

He said: "On marketing and branding, there's more attention to it but I don't think we've really seen the traction of that completely yet.

"There's considerably more activity with the media, it's a slow burn but there's some evidence of that happening."

He added: "The assets under influence (accredited firms have) is massive, it's billions."

While he was encouraged by the research results, he said the next aim had to be building the scale.

He said there was a lack of evidence to suggest an ability or appetite to up-scale.

He said: "It's a good message but I'm not sure the message is getting out there in a structured way. How do we take this expertise and scale that?"

He added: "Succession planning remains a challenge. I suspect succession planning for a lot of us means mergers."

Commonality of systems will make mergers easier – with many using software such as Voyant, he said, adding that there would be more about this in the full report.

Detailed statistics and analysis from Manchester Metropolitan University will be included in the final publication.

One delegate said that the response to the survey - 42 out of 68 firms – was a "bit disappointing". A member of the Bloomsbury Wealth team said the timing of the survey in the last quarter of the year was not good because the firm did not have have resources to respond.

Mr Billingham said they would take this feedback on board.