NextWealth Live 2026 – Advice panel: Business models to serve the other 91%

Transcript (generated via AI)

Advice panel: Business models to serve the other 91%

Emma Napier

When we were coming up with what the advice panel was going to be this year, we needed to think about it in terms of growth. And there’s growth of demand for advice. There’s also demand to generate new talent in this industry to deliver that advice. And then at the other end of the scale, there is the capacity to serve the people that want advice as well.

• Andrew is Head of Pensions Retail at Vanguard, and they’ve been working really, really hard on targeted support.
• Cathi is Founder of The Verve Foundation, which is the only UK independent, not for profit, focusing on financial services new talent. And she’s going to talk about the work that they’ve been doing to generate new talent to come and support the advice
• Matt runs a business called Niche Private Clients. Matt also co-founded CashCalc, which many people in the room will know. And his other business, as if you’ve not got enough to do, is ZeroKey, which is thinking about technology in an advice business, and how you can manage the capacity to be able to scale.

So the whole train track, from driving more demand for advice, through new talent, into what that means, in terms of capacity.

Andrew Marker – Vanguard

When we think about where we stand in the industry today, there are some key issues that we need to tackle. Consumer demand is the big one that’s growing significantly. But let’s think about the challenges that sit beneath that demand. Auto-enrolment is working – the rate is probably not where it needs to be – but that’s going to drive more consumers who need to have investment advice into our pipeline at some point in the long term. Access to advice is struggling at the moment. But the government’s Savers to Investors initiative is important, because that’s going to take that idle cash of about £2 trillion that could be working for people a lot better and help our industry a little bit more as well.

Then there’s digital advancements. We are all embracing that today, but so is the consumer. People are drifting away from desktop – mobile phone is the way they like to engage. And they want more than guidance. I think in the D2C market, we’ve relied heavily on guidance as a general thing. They don’t want that much anymore. They want someone just to tell them what to do or do it for them. And that’s kind of what that consumer base is looking like today.

And then how do we get to that better outcome? Consumer Duty has helped and hindered us. It’s been a great thing for us as an industry, in the sense that it’s made us think about outcomes and we can demonstrate that with transparency. But the big opportunity for us is the advice/guidance boundary review. What’s come out of that is the first phase of targeted support and how that can really get to consumers.

So the way we think about it at Vanguard from a personal investor perspective is that journey that people go on. Now this is like an atypical type investor. We appreciate there are ups and downs as you go through. But for those embarking on that savers-to-investors journey, starting out with low complexity, we think targeted support is the ultimate opportunity for us as an industry and as a firm to really help get those investors to take that idle cash and put it into investing and work better for them as a general outcome.

Now that has limits. It’s only going to go so far. It’s a point in time. And that’s why we think the simplified advice regime is how we as an industry can really collaborate around this – because the journey goes from targeted support to simplified advice. People go from simple needs into slightly more complex needs where they need a little bit more advice. That’s how we start to build a bigger wealth pool for all of those individuals to have more money to live on in retirement. And it flows naturally into that bigger, more complex, holistic advice model. I think we all know this, but there are opportunities on the table for us as we work that through. So that’s how we think about it from a Vanguard perspective. We think savers-to-investors might be younger there are some older savers in there as well. So in conclusion, we know the demand is growing, the regulatory landscape is evolving with some of the market trends, albeit not as fast as we like. The digital advancement is the one that we see the most. That’s where consumers are — but how can we use that to help consumers get there and provide that support for end-investors. Our biggest opportunity is the next step which is the simplified advice regime. So the big ask out to the industry is how can we collaborate better? I think Jerry mentioned it earlier. We don’t, as an industry but we could collaborate better to help our regulator come up with a framework that we can all use better to get to more consumers to really kind of close that advice gap.

Cathi Harrison – The Verve Foundation

Verve is a support services company to financial advisers so we do everything from paraplanning and admin to compliance and marketing and just everything that they need that isn’t giving advice. I started the business about 17 years ago. I’ve been in finance 21 years now. But about five years ago, I just got so frustrated of hearing about the same problems and talking about the same problems over and over again, and nothing actually getting done about it. And that’s how the Verve Foundation got launched. So one of those issues was not bringing enough new people into financial services. So I used to sit on panels and go, Oh, it’s really bad – no one’s choosing financial services as a career and we’re not talking about in school. But then people would come up to me who’d been in the audience and say I have heard about finance. I would love to come into it, but I’ve sent my CV to 50 advice firms, and they’re all saying that because I haven’t got any experience they won’t take me on.

So we were talking constantly about we need more people. And the people are going, Hey, can I come in? And we’re like, no, no, no, you can’t. And I just got so annoyed. I got so annoyed about talking about the same stuff all the time. There are great, large businesses that have got their own internal academy. So that is bringing new people in, but only for their firms so what are we doing collaboratively to actually move that dial a little bit. We’re the only dedicated not-for-profit. There’s no commercial element to it. We just look at some of the challenges in financial services and ask what could we do to empower other people, individuals, companies, to work together, either they sponsor initiatives. People give their time. They come in and do mentoring, whatever it might be like. How are we just kind of harnessing this frustration that a lot of people feel to actually get some activity going. This all started five years ago. It came out of, actually, the whole kind of covid era where, again, we were saying, nobody’s choosing finance as a career. But the headlines were, hundreds of 1000s of people are losing their jobs in retail and hospitality. So there’s, you know, hundreds of 1000s of people need a new career. We need new people. How do you kind of pair it up?

Even more so now,  with the changes created by AI, if we look ahead, in five years’ time to what financial services could look like, we’re all guessing. None of us actually know, but we do know that if there’s no people in here there’ll nobody to be giving the advice, or to be working with the AI, or to be developing the new tech. So one way or another that needs to be happening, and the purpose of the foundation and the work that we do is ideally, in five years’ time, it is still a thriving industry, and we are all benefiting from it.  

In terms of the foundation, there are two initiatives. First we help new advice firms get started. So this is existing advisers feeling the frustrations of consolidation and of private equity, and deciding to strike out on their own. So the breakaway advisers that people talk about, we’re inundated with them. So we run boot camps. We help them figure out their next steps, whether to go directly authorised, whether to go network, and if network, which one. [SEE STATS SLIDE] The demographics are 26% female. There’s obviously still a lot of work to do there, but it is an improvement on the 20% female advisErs or the 20% female business owners in the UK. So there is some progress happening.

There other main initiative, and obviously the one that I’m focusing on today is our New Talent Initiative. With that, we bring new people in. We then fundraise, and then we use that money to pay those people to pay their qualifications. So basically, we fundraise and give it all straight to the CII, but  they get their textbooks, their membership, their exam entry, and then we work with them. We run training programmes. We coach them to help them to find jobs. Every time we open a cohort, which will have 10 funded spaces, we get over 100 applications. So don’t ever, ever, ever think that people don’t want to come into finance. I promise you, they absolutely do. Average age is 36 – again, isn’t that the demographic that we always want. 71% of them coming in are female. Because this is a funded initiative, we are able to positively discriminate. So on some of the cohorts, we will actively only take women to do something to have that impact, and start to move the dial.

[SLIDE OF RECENT RECRUITS]

And as the recent recruits show there us this variety of people that coming in as well. You might get new people fresh out of university and but actually, people bring in their life experience, and coming into financial services is really key. The weirdest one is the guy who’s left wine to come into finance.

Victoria – Book editor:

“Dad died in 2017 and then my mum died, so I inherited some money, kind of more money than I really knew what to do with. You know, inheritances are  often quite an emotional sort of way to kind of receive money. I kind of got my first insight into working with a financial adviser. Kind of realised that it is so much more than kind of numbers on the spreadsheet. So it was such a powerful experience that I thought maybe I could help other people in the same situation”

Isn’t that just like the most perfectly empathetic example of the people that we want to be coming into finance, but how would she have even got started if there wasn’t something like the Verve New Talent Initiative to do that, and that’s the new in podcast. So please feel free to listen and rate and subscribe. Just to finish up with where we are right now in the programme [SEE SLIDE]. So that’s the number that are currently going through that we’ve already fundraised for and we will be covering this year. There’s over 200 in my pipeline. I’ve got plans of more things that I can do to help them, but those people are there, and they do want to come in. At the end of March 2026, we’re launching a recruitment platform to pair up people that want to get into finance with companies willing to give them a chance to get a job. There is endless talent choosing to come into financial services but it’s for us all to work out how to embrace – it’s for everybody to work on it, collectively, not just the foundation, because we’re just teeny tiny. Given the size of some of the businesses in financial services in this room if we can have this amount of impact, imagine how much more impact there could be if some of the larger companies were helping and doing it too.

Matthew Wilshire – Niche Private Clients

I am my colleague who’s here with me today founded Niche Private Clients in 2018 where we acquired a historic business. We sat down together with a blank piece of paper and asked what would we want a chartered financial planning firm to look like? Who are the type of clients we want to deal with? Who can we help and offer the greatest level of assistance to and add value to? We also had a tech interest having founded CashCalc in 2014 to solve a problem with our own business, which was to be able to articulate what we do and the value we add in almost pictorial form. That business grew and we sold that in 2021 but fundamentally the job wasn’t done. Integration was still something that was really lacking. So ZeroKey became the new focus, which we’re looking at now. But it always comes from a point where we’re solving a problem within our own business.

Where we sit now is that we’re a firm built on four key principles [SEE SLIDE]. We are chartered. We put that as a bit of a badge of honour because clients want our expertise so us being the best we can be in our industry is always going to be one of the key parts to that. So, they’re coming to us for that knowledge, for that technical expertise and for being up to date with current affairs. Second, having gone through the process of selling a technology business  could provide a level of empathy for other entrepreneurs that a lot of our peers may not be able to offer.

The third very fundamental principle for us is fixed fees. Fees are quite a sensitive topic especially now when industry fees are increasing.  With most professional services, there’s a fixed fee – a set charge.

So we said, “Can we look at our business and boil every minute of our time down to a cost? And if we can do that, how do we then structure our fees to be able to pass them on to the client and tell them what they’re going to be up front. So we publish our fees on our website but they’re based on complexity and not on AUM. So fees are based on how much work we need to do for a client – not how much money they have.

And the final principle is about tech. I am a self-confessed introvert. Hence, standing here is quite unpleasant, but fundamentally, I am obsessed with, if we have a problem, can we solve it, and rather than waiting for someone else to do it, we ask we solve it ourselves. Claude is my new best friend. Being able to build applications that have lived in your head for years is quite an interesting thing to be able to do. But it also widens our capacity as a business to speed up how we deliver things and spend time on what’s important. Because what the client really wants is the relationship, the empathy, the trust. They value those parts of the relationship. Everything else is a means to an end.

But what does all that mean for us as a business? What that has meant is we started in 2018 with £175 million under management. We were already a good business with some great people in it. But we wanted to see what could we achieve? Until January 2026, we had four advisers and 18 staff in total. We’re now at £620 million under management. We added £100 million in 2025 in new business. But as much as that’s great, it doesn’t drive our fees. What drives our fees is the amount of clients we speak to, how we deliver that, and the people we help.

And that brings us to the team structure. The key building block is, if we are going to build something that has £2.5 billion under management, for example, how are we going to scale and grow? So we structure our entire business around the “pod” model. That is the idea that you have a senior financial planner. I’m very proud that we were a team of 18, eight of whom are chartered. As a ratio, that’s pretty darn good, and I’m proud of that. But the financial planner is not necessarily the person putting all those pieces together. What we have  is a charter financial planner who is client sourcing. They’re out there building relationships with professional introducers and they oversee the advice process. One of the key people in our team, though, is that second chair, the senior para planner. We have a charter financial planner that sits alongside us as a desk based individual. They are also speaking to clients. They are also involved in that process. But their skillset isn’t necessarily going out finding clients. So we’re building something based on people’s skills. And that works really well. And then last, obviously, we thave an additional paraplanner/administrator.

Now, this can be slightly scaled up and down as well but we think this is a structure that can look after 200 clients, can look after £300,000 to £500,000 of fee income, with about £150  million of AUM per team. That’s an average in our team. We average about 0.3% for advice. We also have this idea of a growth trigger. So one of the one of the paraplanners who sat as that second chair within our team has actually just taken a slug of one of the advisers books and has now become an adviser in his own right.  So it’s this idea that they’ve worked with these clients probably three or four years, they’ve already got relationships with those clients so there’s a natural transition to move that second chair up. They can also build that while they’re working with the other advisor, so it naturally moves its way on. We’ve done that as a team already twice. Two of our other advisers were both paraplanners and are now chartered financial planners dealing with a book of £400,000 in revenue as a team. That’a one of the reasons why we’re well positioned to grow.

So we’ talked about growth of the team and growth of assets. But with the other part is about growth of our referrals. We’re really seeing GEO is something that we’ve already really benefited from within our business. We’re fixed fee. We were listed in unbiased’s top 10 wealth managers in the UK. I was on radio four the other day, talking about AI and wealth. The LLMs love it and we’re getting two or three a week now already.

The referral source we’ve worked the hardest on is that professional introducers. We spend an awful lot of time speaking to corporate finance, solicitors and accountants. Discretionary managers is also interesting – being fixed fee and being genuinely independent and agnostic we get an awful lot of our referrals, an awful lot of our work, from industry discretionary management. And we get that because they can see that we can separate the fees and the planning from the assets under management. We look after a family office as a company as well, which is not included in our AUM numbers. And again, we were brought to give the pure planning piece – being able to separate that has made an enormous difference to us as a business as well. Finally, one of the key bits for me is this idea that we speak to entrepreneurs, because I’ve been there, I have done it, and we are ultimately empathising in their situation.

Shivan: So you had a graph that you go from targeted support to holistic advice when a client comes to you. So what’s the key thing that you do to get clients to enter the door in the first place?

Andrew Marker: We sit as a digital only platform, so we’re really attracting customers who are only working kind of digitally. We don’t tend to have any of those paper channels, but you do need a little bit of kind of marketing sitting up there just to kind of get the brand there. We’ve got brand awareness, but it’s about trying to get some marketing there. And then once you get customers onto the website, it’s thinking about the UX, which we spend a lot of time testing consumers: What keeps going through the experience? What do they want to see when they get there? The hardest part is getting them there; once they’re there, it’s them about trying to hold them all the way through to that experience. If you can get them through to that, then, you know, you’re actually starting to build that trust as they go through Target Support, Simplified Advice and further up the chain.

Shivan: What’s the best way to retain them?

We think it is by offering value and one way to do that is always keeping our costs relatively low. So we focus a lot on cost as a brand. But actually, it’s not just cost that drives value. We are finding more and more that it’s the customer service, If they can reach out to us when they need to and get help, that’s what they’re looking for. We have a thought process internally, which is meeting them at the point when they want to be met. As long as we do that, that’s how we retain our customers.

Audience: There are 35 million people in the advice gap. Even if you get your pods to 250 clients per pod, you need 145,000 advisers to serve that gap. Now, Cathi, you’re doing brilliant work, but I’m not sure you’re going that fast. So why is no one talking about AI?

Cathi Harrison: Some of the most interesting conversations I’m having at the minute is with those who have been in advice and are maybe looking at the next advice business or building a new one, and before they even think about the advice bit, they’re doing the AI build and the tech build first. And what’s been a challenge, I think, historically, is there was already an advice business, a structure, a process, and then you try plug in a bit of tech and a bit of AI, and it just makes no difference.

The stuff that’s coming through in the next few years is the stuff where the AI is literally being built first, the advice and the clients come afterwards. This is the stuff that can really move the dial but those AI first businesses will still need people  and that input and oversight. If nothing else, you need people coming in to do the engineering and recording. Yeah, I absolutely agree. But I think, I think the interesting thing with AI is every single panel and topic and presentation conversation today is a topic of its own, and then there’s a sub layer of the topic, which is the AI focus, and it’s just so many lenses and so much to cover on it.

Matthew Wiltshire: My big concern with this conversation generally is that 91% of the country don’t take advice. The truth is, I’m not sure that’s actually a correct stat anyway. I think the truth is, is that of those 9% of people, at least half those just buy a product. They’re not really getting financial planning. They’re not getting financial advice at all. So  when we talk about 91% needing advice, the truth is it’s more than that.  AI needs to empower people. If we can wrap tools around the empathy, the trust and the individuals, we can supercharge how many we speak to, and actually drive down the price of genuine advice.

AI and targeted support will need to do an awful lot of heavy lifting when it comes to that side. But, the reality is that we need to get away from product, full stop. If we’re going to get more people to buy in to what we’re selling, it needs to be a lot less about the product. Whenever we sit with a client, we talk about planning a journey. There’s lots of different ways you can get somewhere – by train, by plane, by car. But fundamentally what the industry struggles with is that they’re always trying to sell the engine first rather than talking about where you’re going. They’re not talking about what you’re trying to do. They’re trying to sell you that there’s an engine sat under the bonnet.

Cathi Harrison: And I think it absolutely was the case that there very much was a product focus. But I think there’s been a huge change all the years. And a lot of people come at it as I’m a business owner, first and foremost, I need to think about brand. I need to think about marketing. Need to think about my team, and I need to think about my team, and I need to think about building a good culture. And then think about what is it I’m actually selling. I think the shift has been massive in terms of thinking about the client relationship rather products first.

Matthew Wiltshire: We are still such a small handful of people to serve such a big group of people. We’re into territory where there’s still a huge amount of product. I like to see the change, we’re all part of it,  but it’s not going to happen quick enough, unless there are things that support it. And obviously, AI going to help us have more time to think, more time to be the person in the room.