The Retail Distribution Review (RDR) will see the adviser community shrink by a further 10%, it is being forecast.

Speaking at the Aviva roundtable debate yesterday on the future of intermediary businesses, Dean Lamble, director of distribution development at Aviva, said he expected the number of advisers leaving the industry post-RDR to be quite limited.

Lamble said the biggest challenges currently facing advisers are how to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, how to generate additional revenue streams and recurring income, and how to deliver client value efficiency.

According to the latest Aviva research, 67% of advisers said they will reduce costs post-RDR through greater use of platforms, while 33% of advisers said they will reign in costs through the adoption of adviser back-end systems.

How advisers segment their businesses will also become an important factor post-RDR, the roundtable panel agreed. Aviva data shows the majority of advisers (63%) plan to adopt segmentation of clients and deal with everyone 23% plan to drop lower value clients and focus on the profitable ones 9% plan to embrace lower value clients and offer alternative forms of advice, while 5% say they will treat older clients as a separate segment altogether.

Speaking at the roundtable event, Nick Bamford, executive director of Informed Choice, said he would be reluctant to help clients that could not afford his company’s services. “Why should we help people that can’t afford our service? That’s the government’s job to tackle