NextWealth Live 2026 – CEO Big Debate

Transcript (generated via AI)

CEO Big Debate: Adapt, innovate and thrive

Peter Mann: As Heather said in her introduction, It is our ambition to try and help people understand and contribute towards the growth in the number of people who take financial advice as well as the quality of it. So what we’ve tried to do in this panel is to bring people from substantial businesses together who have a different lens and who’s businesses have a slightly different focus. The businesses they run represent over £320 billion worth of business. So these people influence the lives of  hopefully growing 8% who do take advice.

Andrea Montague – Brooks Macdonald

I truly believe, with the tailwinds that we’ve got in the industry and the clients and the support they need, we’ve got everything to go for if we can support each other through that. Brooks McDonald was set up 35 years ago by another charismatic individual called Chris McDonald. We’ve also got Richard, who’s still in the business today, and a fabulous CIO and his investment philosophy live in our processes today. But Chris set up the business because he wanted to do something different. At the time 35 years ago there were a lot of commission models and he wanted just really one thing: transparency for clients, and we’ve grown from there.

And I think that – back to Heather’s client point – is at the heart of everything we do. We only sell through independent financial advice, and we are fully committed to that, because we truly believe that that brings really good outcomes for clients, and we can testify to that through strong investment performance. So essentially, he moved the model to a fee model, and as we all know, some very large players have moved reasonably quickly after that to that model.

We’ve come a long way since then in terms of adapting. I took the role 18 months ago, but we grew from that stage, listed at just £500 million on the market, which in today’s age, would probably not have happened. But I took the business to the main market. We’re now £20 billion in fuma, and have a laser focus on clients. Our ambition, clearly, is to be the best wealth manager in the UK.

We’ve got three very simple objectives to be able to do that, and the first one is client service, and that means servicing IFAs across the UK. We did sell the international business, because ultimately, the UK has a vast opportunity for us, and we believe that’s where we’re best placed to thrive. The testament to client retention, if we do the right thing for clients, night follows day. We have 98% client retention from all our acquisitions and I’m really, really proud of that. We worked very hard. You’ll all have been through processes of integration, and they’re not easy. But the real test is that our people retained the clients and supported them through that.

So innovation is the second theme for our business. Ultimately, we’re very focused on the retirement market and the tailwind that’s coming into the market with 15% of us in the UK moving into retirement. Obviously, you can tell from the panel we’re all a long way from that, but ultimately we need to help our customers prepare for that. AI for us means real tools that are changing our business operationally, and making it better for the end client, making it better for our own people. And we’ve got a multitude of case studies across the business. But what has struck me about AI is I’ve lived through very many big tech stack strategy changes in IT, which took forever. As the finance person in the room, usually, I didn’t ever see the return on them, frankly. Now, as a CEO, I leave my finance people to do their job, but ultimately AI is delivering outcomes day in, day out, in terms of efficiency and return on capital. And that’s really encouraging, because in a six-week turnaround, you can see the impact from beginning to end, and I think that’s really exciting. And we can talk about how it will shape advice — that’s, I’m sure, a debate that we will get to.

Another issue is how we will shape and innovate our partnerships. So we work with at least three of those big names to help keep that ticket price down as well. But ultimately we are not a technology business. So we will outsource that to very capable firms with complementary capabilities to what we’re delivering to our clients.

On M&A, 18 months ago, I took on selling the international business to get back to that core belief of the UK market. We have brought in some brilliant businesses, and I’m really, really pleased with how they’re interacting with our clients. The thing that surprised me most is the feedback loop into what is core to Brooks. Core to Brooks is 35 years of investment management experience that outperforms over 1,3,5, and 10 years. So ultimately, that feedback loop and proposition and development will help us continue to innovate, and that’s in part, how we have developed the retirement income strategies, which is really giving our clients some confidence and security. We support clients in the build-up and in retirement. So in the end, I’d summarise by saying my job is really simple. It’s making sure our business provides service to IFAs across the UK, but ultimately provides financial security, because that’s what people want most. And the one thing I wish I could do would be change the news feeds in the UK market. Any advice on that I would really appreciate. I got a taxi here  and I felt quite depressed when I got out, because the man told talked at me for 20 minutes, raced through bank, and by the end of it, I thought he’s going to keep his cash under a mattress, and that’s the opposite of what he wants to do. So I give him some some very brief advice. I’m not qualified advisor, so please don’t shoot me. But I thought financial security is not keeping your cash in a very big banks, earning next to zero interest return. But ultimately it demonstrates that to get beyond the 9% we really need appeal in a different way. Because the fear of investing is sometimes harder to get past. But that is a trusted, independent that’s a trusted personal relationship that all of your teams, our teams, are trying to do day in day out, to close that gap.

Stuart Phillips – The Private Office

Within the TPO, we’ve spent the last number of years very deliberately building a business designed from the bottom up to grow. Therefore the architecture of the business is designed in such a way to hopefully support that organic growth. We look after about £3.5 billion for clients at the moment, and if we remove markets from that and withdrawals, we’re growing at sort of mid-teens at the moment. I’m mindful that will become increasingly harder as we grow with scale. But what I would say is, whilst it might be harder than a buy-to-build approach, it does compound, and we’ve definitely found that and managed to maintain that percentage to date.

In terms of growing our clients, we’ve built something that’s not designed to inherit clients necessarily, or to go out and acquire them, but rather to attract an audience. And we’re attracting lead inquiries, which are inbound at about 1,300 lead inquiries a month which we then convert. We’ve taken the same approach with our people. We have at the moment, 54 advisers across our three offices, just over 75% have grown organically, and we have just about 40% of those are female. The average age of our advisory team is 36. So we don’t look like lots of the businesses around the business.

In terms of how we hold ourselves up – we are financial planning charted. It’s one of the things that our team, and we think our potential new clients, really regard. In terms of equity ownership, we’ve recently had a transaction with with Goldman Sachs. It’s their hybrid fund is from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, so it’s not their PE. Very purposefully, they don’t hold control, and they become our largest minority shareholder. Actually, it’s not just the advisors who hold the equity. We’ve got a 25% shareholding with an environmental charity through one of our original founders, but every single member of staff holds equity in the business too, which I think not only drives that culture, but also helps us manage risk through the business as well.

So in terms of how we run our money, we’re pretty vertically integrated, because at the core is that is that data and part of the architecture that we’ve acquired is to be very vertically integrated. So we have 86% of our assets with Hubwise, and 76% of our investment assets are run through Pacific Asset Management. That allows us to drive very rich data into the business and make real-time decisions and work out where to spend our money. But it also allows consistency of approach which marries against it. I think lots of people, when I’m in in much smaller groups than this, ordinarily say, Stuart, you’re a fast growing business. I would say we aren’t just a business that grows — we’re a business that is designed to grow. And it’s a small nuance, but I think it’s a very important one.

Steven Levin – Quilter

We’re a vertically integrated business. We operate in two segments. We have an affluent business, and we also have a high net worth business in the discretionary management space, which is called, called Quilter Cheviot. We operate in both the IFA market and we have our own advisers. We’ve got about 1500 advisers within Quilter, predominantly in the network. We also have a national business and we’ve got a franchise called Quilter Partners, which we’ve established and are growing over time. I think one thing that people don’t always know about Quilter is actually we are much larger on the IFA side; 75% of our business actually comes from IFAs. It’s a very important part and the fastest growing part of our business actually, which is, which is hugely important. We have our own asset management solutions as well and core investment solutions for clients. Probably we’ve got the largest managed portfolio solution in the market, which we’re very proud of.

Our philosophy is really about helping customers but we’re an advised business, so we help customers through advisers. We really are about offering advisers a fantastic proposition, great service, great support, all of those things. We think there’s a huge amount of potential. Wealth Management is a growing sector and, compared to others, it is a sector that naturally compounds. People do add more money. We have got more people reaching retirement age every year for the next decade than ever before. You just need to look at a population curve to see that. People need to save more for their retirement to look after themselves. The thing that really drives us is the retirement gap crisis that we see unfolding before us, and that’s what we want to make a difference about.

The challenge is the UK has got to move from being a nation of savers to being a nation of investors, and it is not doing that anywhere near the pace that it needs to. In fact, when you compare the UK to other markets, such as the US or South Africa, there still is this mindset that someone else will take care of you. We’ve come from an era of defined benefit pensions, your employer would take care of you, the government will take care of you through a state pension and things like that. The reality is, the UK has moved on, there are no more people with defined benefit pensions. The generations retiring now will have very little. The generations retiring in 10 years’ time are going to have nothing. But I don’t think the average consumer, the average client, has actually clocked that yet, and that’s a critical thing. That’s our role to educate them.

So what has to happen is people need to realise, actually, you need to look after yourself. We all know that the auto enrolment contribution rates are way too low to reach a meaningful retirement, and they’re not likely to go up by government mandation anytime soon. But it’s just simple economics. If you know how much people actually contributed, between employer and employee, to defined benefit pension funds it has often been 20, 25 or 30% of salary. We’re nowhere near that in DC land, and it’s not going to get to that. People have got to realise that they’ve got to take responsibility, and that’s our role to do. Contrast that with countries that don’t have those state support systems. They haven’t had a defined benefit pension environment for a very long time there. You have to look after yourself. As a result, the taxi driver equivalent in New York would own stocks, but we don’t have that here. That is the problem that the UK needs to embrace and grapple with, and that is the role that we have to all play as in industry. That is why only 9% people are getting advice that gets them to the right place. But a second problem is that, because there’s a shortage of advisers, because there are a whole lot of barriers to clients getting advice and all of those things. Combined those barriers with the mistaken mindset that other people are going to look after you and that is why are we sitting in this massive problem in this country. And that’s where we’re trying to make a difference. I think we’ve got some ideas and things that we are working on. But this is a massive, massive problem that all of us in this room have got to make a difference about. I do think it will be solved. The one scenario where it gets solved is that nothing happens for the next 10 years, and then people realise that the people who are retiring 10 years ahead of them actually have had a pretty horrible existence and then change happens. Now that’s not any of us want to see. We’ve got to start them before that, but you’ve got to break through in terms of messaging, financial education and really starting to get access to more people. And that’s, that’s what we’re focused on.

Michael Summersgill – AJ Bell

AJ Bell is a pure play platform provider. We do not provide financial advice. Now, there’s a few nuances to that. You know, we have our own investment management capabilities as well. So there are elements of vertical integration there, but financial advice is not something we provide. The business is set up to be a dual-channel platform so we operate in both the direct consumer market and then in the intermediated space, through through advisers, financial planners and wealth managers.

We do that, importantly, with a single tech-stack and a single operating model. So whilst the user interface and the distribution is completely different in those two different markets, once a client is using the platform – whether that’s an advised client or somebody who’s going direct – all of the data, all the transaction processing,  It’s all standardised to be dealt with in the back office in the same way. And the reason that that’s important is it means that we genuinely do get the scale benefits of being in both of those markets, as we have well over £100 billion on the platform now. And that’s one of the reasons that we’re able to price at the level that we are, as it’s quite an efficient business in this market.

We don’t provide financial advice. It was a view that Andy had about not wanting to complicate the business. Keep it capital wise, keep it scalable, and stay out of areas where we did not believe that we would be excellent. I would add that I don’t want to be in competition with the people using the platform. Now there are lots of firms that do that very successfully and there are pros and cons to our approach. You sometimes feel one step removed from that financial planning process because we’re not doing that day in, day out ourselves. So we have to make sure that we listen very carefully to the people who do use the platform, and that we take our business and our products in the right direction based on their experiences, whatever their business model might be. However, it’s not something that we have any inclination to change as we sit here today. But the market is consolidating, and so we need to make sure that we think about how different business models emerge, and that we can be a successful partner to those firms and help to support their businesses and grow the industry

In terms of the market more broadly, I think some of the changes in technologywill actually play out more quickly in the direct market than they will in the advice side of the market. The route to market for somebody looking to go direct to consumers has already, has already changed. That’s not in terms of the weight of where the business comes from – that’s still a search engine and a digital marketing game. But we’re already seeing the impact of the large language models. About 18 months ago, we saw the inflection point of impressions continuing to accelerate, and clicks not doing, as the zero click search results really took off. So making sure that you can still reach the consumer in that world is an important trend, and also where the user interface sits between the LLM and between the product providers is something that will change. I think that those trends are important for the audience here today, because that will inevitably have an impact across all aspects of financial services, even if there is an advice process as a key part of the service.

Targeted support has been mentioned in a few conversations – for the direct market, there is relevance there. The average new customer that we’re winning onto the direct platform has a portfolio value of around £30,000. At that level, targeted support and fully digital journeys will be the way to give the best possible support to those customers. But as you then move through simplified advice and into full advice, there’s still a whole lot of legislative change around pensions, and the tax treatment of pensions, and that’s starting to accelerate the intergenerational wealth transfer.

The last point I’ll briefly mention is that one of the things that we’ve been trying to do is look at the ways that people can, even at the lower end of the market in terms of portfolio value, stay in a model of being given full financial advice. So ‘Touch’ is a product that we’re we’ve brought to market recently, with that very much in mind. So orphan customers as an example, intergenerational wealth transfer and supporting that through through multi-generational families with a single, single advisor. That’s one of the opportunities and one of the ways in which we see the market changing, and one of the things that we’re trying to do to support growth.

Gerry Mallon – True Potential

I spent most of my career in Banking so actually, when I joined the sector and looked at some of the things that we’ve talked about, such as the 9% penetration of advice into the population. there’s a few things that I find completely fascinating about it. The first thing is that cash is definitely losing value every day. People are not getting the full value of investing that cash and in a world full of volatility and uncertainty, they are clearly missing out. But somebody is benefiting from it, and that’s the banks. It’s going to provide some very nice, low cost liquidity and translates into very healthy bank margins. So you know, the debate is really about who should share the benefit of this liquidity and we strongly believe it should be our clients to a greater extent.

If you’re only penetrating 9% of the population, what is the barrier to people doing that? There’s certainly perceptions around a lack of need, a lack of understanding around the utility of our products. Surveys have shown there’s a there’s a lack of perception of value around what we charge for our advice, and there’s also a lack of trust in advisors.

But I almost immediately discount the issue of trust as a reason because there’s no shortage of mistrust of banks. But yet, everybody has a bank account from the age of 11 or 12, and nearly certainly everybody has one from their mid-teens. So people take bank accounts because there’s utility in the product, and they see a benefit from it and that’s widely accepted. So therefore, I think we’ve got a challenge as an industry for consumers to properly understand the benefit of what we bring. If we don’t engage consumers on their own terms to convince them of the benefit and the value of the advice that we provide, we are definitely failing them as a cohort.

There are three broad areas in my mind as to what the industry needs to do in terms of helping close the advice gap, and they’re to do with advisers, and adviser supply and efficiency of advice,and demand for advice, which is this consumer element, and then the enablement of advice, which I think is, which I think is, is technology.

On supply of advice –it’s clear that the adviser population has been gradually diminishing over the years. Advisers are retiring quicker than they’re being replaced. It’s clear that we need more advisers, and we need to find a better way of attracting more people into the industry. We all have our own strategies as to how we build and grow and make our own contribution to that. But I think in addition to that, leveraging advisers just to make them higher impact and make sure that they can serve more customers at scale is a critical element of what needs to be done next.

So the True Potential model from its inception has been about utilising technology in order to be able to enable advisors to be much more efficient and to be able to scale their client portfolios. So, take away the regulatory admin burden. Take away the client admin burden. Allow advisers to be able to do to serve more customers much more easily. The approach was, historically, in particular, to find retiring advisers and onboard their clients so that we can ensure that those clients don’t become orphaned. It’s increasingly expanded into finding advisers  who want to be able to grow their client bases and support them to have the capacity to do that.

So that brings me to technology as the kind of the other enabler of advisers to be able to do more. It’s pretty clear that technology has changed the way in which we deliver advice. Certainly it’s been the True Potential model from Day One. But like Quilter, a vertically platform where we’ve got advice, we’ve got the platform and we’ve got the investment solutions, all on a kind of bespoke, integrated tech stack.

The philosophy behind that is that if you can reduce the friction, make it easier for the adviser, make it easier for the client, increase transparency with the client, increase customer satisfaction and reduce cost, you can feed that back into being competitive, but also being a profitable business. So it’s about extending the capability of the human expertise and not replacing it. And I think the next wave will be putting AI into all of those processes, whether they’re operational, advice or whatever it is in order to be able to support the continuation of a human in the loop there and to be able to deliver more advice.

The final part is client demand. Again, it’s, very interesting as I come into the sector that we’ve managed to make financial advice as a sector feel like something which is very exclusive. You know, there isn’t a perception that it’s for everybody, it’s quite complex and there are perceived barriers to people receiving advice. So it’s no wonder that kind of alternative approaches that are easier to understand, have lower barriers and feel less complex gain traction. Cash is easy to understand if you’ve got a bank account; it’s easy to put money into a savings account. ChatGTP is really easy to use to buy crypto. So it’s no wonder you get these alternative approaches by clients emerging. I think we’re also battling the Dunning Kruger effect. That’s the psychological phenomenon where people who have got kind of low skill in something actually perceive their skill to be much higher than it actually is.

So I think we need to find a way to make the value that we add more obvious. We need to move away from maybe some of the historical norms that we’ve had around exclusivity and complexity and a focus on products,  and towards a focus on tapping into clients perceive that they need which is certainty and less stress. We need to be able to explain. How am I going to make your life better with the advice that we provide? Why is that going to be really good value for you? Again, the True Potential focus from the start was to make it really easy to invest with us and to have no minimum threshold for investment. So you can start small, have intuitive digital products that are also easy to engage with. We’re 24/7 available. Banking has its own parallels in the rise of the neo banks that have completely disrupted the banking industry by just finding ways to just make things easier, lower barriers to opening accounts and just making it make it all very simple. We also have this hybrid model of digital and human advice, where it’s easy to get an adviser. You can see an adviser on screen the next day. You don’t have to go to their office, you don’t have to chase them off the golf course. You don’t have to wait till they come back from Marbella in order to make clients that it’s really easy to engage with. Because I feel that as well as a commercial purpose there’s a real social purpose to what we do. The attrition of the value of our clients’ money is real and will come back to haunt them.

Peter Mann:

the point of exclusivity is right. We get pressure through the language that we use, from the way that we behave, from the way that we say we’ve got to do hard exams and all that sort of stuff, we create an impression that we are an exclusive group and we’re not. We are here to help and grow the market. A second observation was the word I heard most in four to five speakers was “barriers”. So not only do we make things difficult because of the vernacular that we use, but also the barriers that are presented to us are unprecedented. You talked about the regulatory, the legislative and the technology barriers to entry, and they are substantial, and they are significant, and we need to find a way of trying to help to unlock those and the work these guys do outside of their businesses, in the representative bodies that are advocates for change is immense.

Audience: How do you see the interface between chatbots and platforms evolving?

MS: We are not seeing the majority of new business or flow come through the LLMs, but we’ve seen the impact that they’re having on consumer behaviour, on how people are researching, on how people are going through that process of buying a product. At present, it’s still all about Google and SEO and PPC. But you can see that it’s changing quite rapidly. So it’s more that the rules of engagement now are understood and the importance of being in those search results and thinking about how do you get the client to go through that that journey, if it’s not a case of having to click on a link to consume your content.

The other, more interesting point is around the user interface, and you’ve seen other industries starting to experiment with this. So, if the consumer is interacting with the LLM, researching, asking questions and considering purchase, to what extent do you then start trying to push your product into that environment? So model context protocol (MCP) connectors are now starting to be built so you can take literally elements of your user interface and serve them within the LLM. At present that’s incredibly niche. There’s not a general awareness of that among consumers. It’s tech enthusiasts who are playing with these sorts of capabilities. It’s a long way from being mass market. But you can see how the user interface for a business like ours has changed. When Andy and Nicholas set the business up, it was face-to-face conversations, it was telephone calls, it was cheques. That was how the consumer interacted with the with the product. You go through the internet. You go through mobile. The user interface changes all the time. I do think that LLMs will change that customer behaviour – you’ll see that in the direct space before you’ll see it in the wealth management and advised space and I’m not saying that to the detriment of business models or even existing ways of interfacing with customers. But it’s a far quicker route to market to build a set of MCP connectors and serve your user interface within the LLM than it is to build a Gen AI platform, and then we’ve got an API layer, and we then call in all of the operational and product teams and those APIs to get that kind of functionality. So you could have that same kind of conversation with the consumer in the front of your product itself, but then you’re into an interesting regulatory question about what interactions you’ve had with them, where the responsibility lies for that, what regulatory permissions you’ve done that under.  But if they’re having that conversation, as they are doing today, directly with the LLM, and then you’re just serving aspects of your user interface into that environment, there’s actually quite a different regulatory position there, because you don’t see the conversation. What you see is the transaction off the back of it. So definitely an area that will evolve rapidly in the industry, as I said, direct first, and then we’ll come over to the world of Wealth Management.

Peter Mann: Steven – how does Ben’s point resonate with you?

SL: So we bought a little business we call Quilter Invest  to start helping advisors deal with smaller clients, to create a digital journey and experience for advisers. We’ve got a lot of advisers who tell us they have a client who comes into the offices who’s got £30,000 to invest and in the politest possible way, they try to tell their clients to please go away, because they’ve only got space for 150 clients, and it’s perfectly rational to take people at age 50 or 55, at peak wealth, etc. What they want from us, and what we’ve built for them is an incubation model. So what they will now be able to do is to say, well, there’s this great proposition from Quilter. We’ve checked it all out. It all stacks up. Download the app and get started there

They will be able to get the client to start to take their first steps; there will be a targeted support journey that will allow them to pick a fund and things like that. And the adviser will stay in touch with those clients. They will communicate those clients a few times a year. They will recommend they sort of keep in touch at tax-year-end and budget changes, those sorts of things. They can see what the clients are doing and if the client wants help, they can press a button and go back to those advisors, and we’ll always keep those clients as clients of those advisors.

What we’re are looking to do is create for advisors and for ourselves the next generation of advised clients. So, sort of almost five or 10 years before they need advice, to get them in and start building them up in a supportive environment. We actually don’t see clients as advised or non-advised. In the future, we see clients drifting in and out and doing both. We see some clients who have some money that their adviser is looking and other money that they want to look after themselves. And I think that’s going to continue. And I think that the future advice models will not necessarily always need ongoing service every year. There may be different models. So we’re gearing up for that, and that’s what we’re looking to do with this business is effectively our way to get into the targeted support space.

Audience:  Robinhood, a US trading platform, launched a pension and they’ve applied for the banking licence. And the reason that they did that was because every time they add a tangential service to their offering, they attract more clients, and they get a larger share of wallet from the clients they’re servicing. We’ve seen Revolut in the UK offer a trading platform. I’m just wondering does it makes sense for us to think beyond wealth as we try and grow our sector, because will we grow by reaching more people, by offering more services, and becoming the financial services provider to our clients, rather than the wealth manager to our clients?

GM: So banking is a massively consolidated scale game at the minute. So I think the notion that those of us who are in wealth would look to diversify into banking is really quite is really quite a challenge. Certainly post global financial crisis, other than the brief advent of challenger banks, we’ve quickly seen scale become the primary concern of banks. On the other hand, if you take it in the other direction, you can see with NatWest’s acquisition of Evelyn Partners the larger banks’ interest in the sector being really quite transparent. Investment bankers are very chatty bunch, and they’ll tell you about exactly who’s interested in exactly what. And you can see with private equity participation in our industry, clearly there’s a direction of travel there. It makes perfect sense strategically for a large bank who sees money disappearing from their clients’ deposit accounts into investment products, for them to retain some of that. Clearly, they also need to diversify into more fee-generating products. I think the economics of it, given the multiples that the sector trades on, versus where banking has been for the last two decades, have been really challenging. But again, you can see, and hopefully it’ll be evidenced by NatWest recovering from the slight telling off it got from the market on the Evelyn pricing. Then I think it’s probably a trend that’s going to continue.

PM: Andrea, you’re diversifying your business with the acquisitions that you’ve made. Are there any plans, or do you think there is any merit in further diversification along the lines that Heather talks on?

AM: In terms of integration, the insurers have done that for a long time. I think Standard Life was probably one of the first to try and integrate some financial planners via 1825 etc. Those were some very focused strategic initiatives that worked well for their day. But the end-client is critical in our all of our strategies. And I do wonder whether the end-client wants to put all of their assets under one name. Our view of the future would be partnerships across the industry will serve us well. And that’s we are beginning to think about. Clearly we’re committed to financial independent financial planning, which is we’ve bought and now integrated six businesses. But ultimately, we truly believe in that independent financial advice. We work with IFAs up and down UK, they’re not competing. And ultimately, the integration in that value chain has to benefit the end-client, as well as the balance sheet of the corporate.  Clearly, NatWest made a very big acquisition. From a strategic perspective, cash models are very important to every bank across the UK. More broadly, I do wonder about how the regulator will handle deposit targets for their financial planners, because we all know they’re out there. But that’s not my problem. We’re  still firmly focused on the UK market because that’s where we believe we’ve got the capital base to grow. But, you know, it is. it’s something that’s here to stay. But I would love to see us working through partnerships further to benefit the end-client, get the price down, get the service up, and get much more efficient as we build out.

Peter Mann: I think there’s a general belief that vertical integration serves primarily the people who do the vertical integration. I don’t think that’s true. Clients like choice, but they don’t like to choose. So if somebody can choose on their behalf, they value that. But having partnerships is really interesting as some of them are big, and they bring things that we can’t necessarily build ourselves.

Audience: So you said that only 9% of people actually take financial advice, and what Mr. Levin said about people being more savers than investors? Do you think that’s more of an educational issue, because personally, being a 17-year-old, I haven’t really seen financial advisory targeting me or my peers especially when we’re exiting university and have so much financial debt. So do you think it’s an educational issue in school, or is it because you don’t target our age demographic? Because then we can go and take on financial advisory later on as well.

SL: We’re a big advocate that we have a foundation focused on financial literacy and financial education at all ages, because there’s a big gap in the school curriculum, and it is starting to be addressed slowly. But actually, there are young adults that have never had financial education so financial literacy is a problem the whole way through. The critical concept that I don’t think people really understand is inflation and real returns and the time value of money, realising that money sitting in a bank account is getting a negative real return and is going to have less purchasing power. We’re putting out stats now as an industry showing what £1,000 put on deposit 10 years ago would be worth in real terms now, versus if you had put £1,000 into a stock market index, and the numbers are striking. After 10 years your £1000 is worth £900 in real terms if you put it in cash, whereas it’ll be worth close to£ 2000, if it’s been invested for 10 years. That the order of magnitude but the average person doesn’t understand that. So there is a massive financial education role. I mean, I am frustrated as hell that financial education is not taught, or financial literacy is not taught in schools. I really think it needs to be. That’s where the that’s where the difference starts. And obviously someone coming out of university will not have a lot of money to invest. But the other thing that people may not realise is a simple little illustration of compound interest will show you is that if someone saves for 10 years amount of money, even if it is £20 a month, and then stops after 10 years and just keeps that money until they retire. They will have more money than the person who starts 10 years later and saves for 30 years until they retire, as an example, that same amount of money every month. The power of compounding, and especially that early start, is you just can’t beat it. So if you can get a university student or someone in first job just to put a little bit of money aside. Compounding power is phenomenal. That is not an understood concept in this country.

PM: How hard is it to get the younger people interested? 

Stuart Phillips: It’s not just the young people. I would say probably the younger people are actually more literate than the middle aged and slightly older, because I think at that point people become terrified of then learning. The power of compounding if you invest in that first 10 years and then stop is a widely unknown issue. I think in terms of the audience that we talk to, they’re normally people who don’t have the education and therefore are asking for an answer to their financial planning question and need to get to a solution. I think a big barrier is when RDR came in and we made advice actually less expensive, but just more transparent, everybody bucked out. The issue is complexity and culture. If you’ve got friends who are American, they will all tell you what their return on capital was last year. They sort of know what that is, and there’s a base level of understanding. The natural lack of education in the UK does suppress saving. Also the fear that all investment comes with risk. You know, we could all, and probably our children, could talk about the risk warnings associated with investments. I think that’s the bit we need to flip on its head. My taxi driver said Bitcoin, by the way, was the thing to get into.

But you’ve got people doing side hustles or trading or, you know, influencers on Tiktok, whatever they call those guys. But I think we have to simplify the world, but then also demystify the risk. People aren’t silly. They are able to take risk, and we should encourage it.

Michael Summersgill: The financial literacy issue has been studied properly in America. Saying we have to put this on the curriculum is fine. But in terms of solving the problem that we’re talking about, the point between the provision of the education and the application is so vast that various meta studies have proven that the impact is virtually zero. So it’s not an effective solution. It’s things like targeted support. It’s things like getting the unit cost down of providing the services that people in this room provide through some of the technologies that we’ve talked about – that is actually a far, far more effective solution. As for the original question about a 17 year old and the financial challenges that you’re you’re faced with at that point and getting advice, I’ll let these guys decide on the commercial merits of being able to serve a customer in that situation, because that’s the challenge that exists as we sit here today.

Stuart Phillips: A lot is to do with the language used. Actually what a 17 year old probably needs is a plan and then we can leave you alone and off you go. You’ll know what that plan is. And I think the advice isn’t designed for that. It’s designed for that dripping roast of annual servicing. You were talking about actually changing that model a bit, but I think that’s partly the barrier. Now, guided advice, guide a live plan then off you go, you can self-serve, you can accumulate, and then when your circumstances change, then you can go back into the system. Because the price to serve, however low you make it, that’s never going to be personalised. It has to be commoditised. You have to be able to self serve, I think, for the vast majority of times. And most people don’t need to see someone every single year to do that. So I’d change the language and say make planning at the beginning the education piece, and then worry about the taking risk.

Audience: It’s been a lot of legislative instability in the last couple of years. I’m just keen to know what all of you are thinking is about, how will they share active, potential legislative changes that could come down the line in the next year, two years, and what assumptions, if any, you’re baking into your business plans.

Michael Summersgill:  So pensions and ISAs are what we focus on as a platform provider and there’s been plenty of change there. The thing around applying IHT to unused pensions on death that concerns me is the lack of thought about how that’s actually going to be implemented and what that means for people who are trying to execute instructions of a will. It’ll be an incredibly difficult process that will put lots of strain on different parts of the financial services and legal system that are not designed to deal with being a personal representative when those rules come in in April 2027. It’s the lack of thought and engagement with the industry. It’s been driven by an ideology to say, we want to do this. We’ll just then find a way through the process. I’ll steer clear of the time limit. The other thing that I will add is the way that the budgets have been run over the last few years has actually done more damage than the content themselves. So the long, drawn-out period of speculation or uncertainty leading up to those key fiscal events and then you leak that, just as the Chancellor’s about to give us a rehearsed speech. That would be the one thing that has frustrated me more than more than anything else, and that is entirely that is entirely avoidable and a choice about a process.

PM: Jerry, you’ve experienced legislation from a different aspect. What does it feel like on this side of the fence??

Gerry Mallon: This sector feels very different in terms of its degree of fragmentation or collaboration versus the banking sector. So I’m still trying to get my head around whether or not it’s just how we perceive each other, or whether or not there’s fundamental different competitive strategies at play. In banking, most banks have got pretty much the same business model. Okay, pretty much every bit of legislation affects every bank in the same way. As a consequence banks generally find Regulation a non-competitive topic, and therefore you can present the united face of the sector to engage constructively with the regulator, to try to encourage them in a particular direction which is conducive to the economy, to clients, to the sector. I don’t think we have the same approach in this industry. Some of that, I think, is down to the fact that, you’ve gotquite different business models, all of whom will be affected differently by changes to regulation. Some of it, I think there’s just historical competitive tensions in the industry, which might be to do with personalities, and might be to do with other baggage, but I think we can do a better job of finding common ground to make sure that we present a case for coherent, constructive management of regulation and legislation which will be in the nation’s interests, not in not just in pure selfish interest.

Audience: In terms of advertising, our industry is really quite poor about getting itself out there, turning up on social media streams, apart from maybe Fisher Investments, who seem to be bombarding all of us. What is holding back the ability to really go big and start promoting? Because if I look at places like Australia, one of the reasons why there is so much talk about investments is because they are competing, they’re stealing client off each other on a monthly basis, and therefore people are starting to understand the products and understand the difference between different vendors and providers. We’re not really doing the same thing.

Andrea Montague:  Yeah, I love, I love the question. So my observation is very similar to yours, that we are very modest about the return for clients. And that’s a cultural piece. It’s a wider sector piece as well. So there’s a huge opportunity as part of the education to get out there more in front of clients. We’ve actually brought someone in from telecoms, from Vodafone, and it’s incredible what she’s done already on social media. But with a relatively small budget, you can make a very big impact. Again, we’ve gone down the sponsorship route because it’s really important for us to out our brand against a brand that we trust and that we share values with, but that seems to be landing. I’m not sure it’s landing with 17 year olds yet, but certainly more people of my age have commented on it. So that’s where we’re putting our investment.

But we do on the whole probably need to join up more. The sector is large enough for us all to do very well and to resolve some of these challenges. It’s probably an opportunity for at least the people on the panel to sit down and have a chat about how we can resolve some of them. But marketing is our responsibility. We need to get out there more and it’s not about praising our own business. It’s about helping the UK as a whole in the economy.