Tony Delaney, who racked up 11 county hurling medals with Toomevara club in north Tipperary as a young man, has taken his knack for spotting openings far beyond the pitch.

More than a decade after leaving a career with Bank of Ireland’s New Ireland life and pensions unit to set up SYS Financial, a firm targeting employers and private wealth clients, Delaney is seizing an opportunity to grow the business at its fastest rate yet.

In the past year, SYS has agreed deals to buy 11 smaller financial brokerages around the country, leaving it on track to increase its assets under advice from €400 million to about €1.1 billion by the end of 2025.

“Consolidation in the broker market is only starting to gain momentum,” Delaney says. “And we’ve become a go-to for brokers looking to find a partner in recent years.”

The number of deals in the pipeline for SYS means the 54-year-old is now talking about having €4 billion to €5 billion of assets under advice by the end of the decade.

To get to the next level, however, SYS is considering taking on a financial investor.

Delaney told The Irish Times this week he was in talks with a number of parties and said the process was “at an advanced stage”.

[ Tony Delaney’s SYS Financial in talks with potential investors to fund deals ]

While he hasn’t ruled out handing over a majority equity stake, he’s clear that his team will continue to be in the driving seat.

“The new investors will have to buy into our culture and not interfere with how the business is run on a day-to-day basis,” he says.

“This industry is based on trust. When we are talking to firms considering selling to us, the big concern for people at the top of the firms is where their clients are going. They have to ask themselves, ‘Can I walk down the street of my town and look former clients in the eye?’.”

While the general insurance broking sector has been the subject of a flurry of mergers and acquisitions over the past decade, consolidation in the financial advisory space – below the likes of the country’s two largest banks’ private banking arms and their stockbroking units, Davy and Goodbody – is in its infancy.

And way behind the curve compared to