NextWealth Live 2026 – Fireside chat

Transcript (generated via AI)

Fireside Chat: Mark Fitzpatrick – St James’s Place

HH: I want to start talking about the transformation happening at SJP. You took over as CEO in December 2023 and the share price has more than doubled in that time. That’s a pretty impressive result. You’ve turned around the company from annual losses of £9.9 million in 2023 to a £500 million in profit in 2024 so that that’s an incredible transformation in a short space of time. So I’m just interested to hear your thoughts on where you where you think the SJP business stands today? What more is there to be done? What do you put that that turnaround down to?

MF: The transformation of St James’s place is still alive and kicking. There’s still a lot of work to be done. When we announced the strategy in July 2024, we set out four key pillars we wanted to work on, and we’re making progress on all of those. And I think with the evolution of technology, with just the size and scale of the market opportunity ahead of us, I think there’s a lot more we can still do. What’s been key along the journey, I think, is bringing in people who have a real good sense of what great looks like. So they bring it to life to people inside the organisation, and they can help us get there  more quickly because they’ve been there before.

So it’s about unleashing the power of St James’s Place, the Academy, the partnership, and the great asset gathering engine that is the business. And just to give you an example, last year, between net inflows and increases in FUM as a result of the great work the investment team have done, our FUM went up £30 billion in the year. It took us 20 years to gather £30 billion FUM from when we first started, and yet we were able to increase that during the course of one year. So it’s the power of scale as well that’s truly beginning to show. And I do think that this is going to become more of a scale game going forward, because the size of investment you’ll need to make, whether it’s in human capital, (because the end of the day that is crucial), whether it’s around the technology, whether it’s around the infrastructure, etc, that you need, all of those components are going to be absolutely critical to success going forward. So it’s a very exciting time to be where I am. It’s a very exciting time to be part of the profession and to look at what we collectively could make the profession, all of us together, and I think there’s still a long, long way to go,

HH: I’d be curious to hear how you describe the business and what is it that customers are buying from you?

MF: I’d put it down to one thing: trust. What we provide people is a trusted relationship. Because once you’ve got trust, you can then build confidence, and then confidence to invest, confidence to engage, confidence to open up about your hopes, your fears, your aspirations. So to me, what we deliver and what we collectively operate on, and what the profession is based on, is trust. And as Warren Buffett said, it arrives on foot, and it can leave on a Ferrari. So it takes years to build, but it can be destroyed like that. So you’ve got to be so conscious in everything you do and how you do it to be able to continue to build trust. But for me, it’s clear too. It’s one word I would boil it down to.

HH:  We heard some interviews with end-customers of financial advice earlier, and that that definitely came up this. This conference is all about growth, and I’ve mentioned already once earlier today that over half of new financial advisers into the market last year came from SJP and were trained by SJP. You’ve long been, as a business, an important driver of growth. You’ve done a lot more marketing than some others to bring new clients in to our industry. And I’d be interested in hearing your growth. Where that comes from. If you’re still ambitious for growth?

MF: I think the total addressable market is large, and I think is going to grow. So I think we have three main gaps. These will all be familiar to you. We have this massive savings gap where £614 billion of excess cash is lying around in people’s accounts. That’s excess cash. Now everybody needs cash in a portfolio, but that level of excess cash is concerning. We are the worst nation in the G7 for the rate of investing that we do. So there’s a lot more we need to do around that component.

The second one is the advice gap. You will know only 9% of adults take advice. The opportunity set there is enormous. And then the third gap is the retirement gap. I think Scottish Widows did a report recently that indicated 39% of people who are about to retire are saving and investing for a retirement level that is going to be below a minimum lifestyle level. So the country is slow walking into a state of crisis unless we actively do something about it. So it’s part of the narrative I’m trying to take to the regulator. It’s part of the narrative I’m trying to take to the government in terms of making sure they’re alive to this. I will continue my conversations with the chancellor, trying to get her to leave pensions alone when it comes to the budget. She has done so much damage to pensions over the last couple of years. Pensions matter. They matter to individuals. They matter to the economy. And if you keep tinkering with them at the individual level, you’re going to have knock-on damage for the economy. She gets that but still sees it too much as the magic money tree in terms of taxation. So really trying to get her to stop any speculation ahead of budget events going forward. So those elements are very, very important.

As to the number of advisers, I think in the last six years on average, the number of new advisors in this profession has grown by 0.4% When you’ve got  an addressable market that is measured in the trillions of pounds, why on earth are we only attracting such a small number in? And you are right, St James’s place is carrying a chair. In the last few years, we’ve added 52% of all new advisers to the profession.

But there’s a longer way to go and there’s much more we collectively need to do. And if we’re to behave as a profession, I think there’s more we need to do in terms of how we behave, how we set our stall out, and how we demonstrate the value we can truly add. Because when it works, the stories each and every one of you will have in this room and know of – of where you or others have actually truly helped families in meaningful ways are phenomenal. And actually, we need to bottle that, and we need to share that more widely across the market.

HH: One of the things that we talked a little bit about today is that there’s a single client proposition. There’s a single route to market, mainly referrals. There’s a proposition typically based on a charging model of percentage of assets. So to reach more of that addressable market, do you think different models of advice are needed? Or is it just getting that story out about what it is that we do?

MF:  I think a huge number of people do not understand what we do. And given the size of the opportunity and how few advisers there are in the market, rushing to be a lowest-cost provider, I think is a route to madness. The costs, the infrastructure, the money that is required to spend to build the systems, the infrastructure, the support, the technology, the change of rules – this isn’t a rush to the bottom. I think we’ll collectively be mad if we destroy our profession that way.

What is really important is helping people understand the relevance. So the acronym I use is R.U.T.. People don’t understand how advice is relevant to them. They don’t understand what advice is and how it can help them. And then on the timing, they think it’s either too early for them or they’ve left it too late to be relevant. Now all the research everybody will have seen  and that we’ve done as well shows it’s not the cost of advice that puts people off by and large. People truly value the relationship. They value the trusted longevity, the connectivity with another human, the fact that we are all emotional shockers when wars are going on, we absorb all the angst. We provide people with the confidence, we take the stress away from them. All of those components truly, truly matter.

So I think it’s helping people understand what we do and how we do it. Across our advisors, I think nearly half of all our clients are word-of-mouth referrals. But there’s still, then, the other nearly 50% that is active utilisation of social media in terms of finding potential leads. There is an element of the conferences and events that the guys run, etc. There’s a lot of time spent on your feet, talking, engaging and meeting people.

Because some of the technical components are complex, but what makes people in this profession so special is their ability to connect with other humans. You know, I’m originally an accountant, I’m a chartered accountant. There are lots of chartered accountants, a lot of actuaries, good at numbers and can make numbers do all sorts of amazing things, but might struggle to hold down a conversation with another human. What you guys do is you create conversation, you make people feel good about themselves and comfortable in terms of who they are, that is so special. And in today’s environment where banks are closing down and speaking to a doctor or a member of the clergy is becoming more and more difficult. So you and what this profession does is becoming even more rare in the market. I think we should focus on and understand that and understand how we attract more people in

Because one of the key components I think we also need to be mindful of is the demographics in the country are changing in terms of where wealth goes. We all know about the generational effect and most of us are alive to the gender effect that more and more money is in the hands of very successful women. But yet, as a profession, only 18% of advisors are women. That’s a problem.

I’m not saying that men can’t be great advisers to women, but it’s really important to be able to provide a choice. So recently we announced that we’ve just hit 1,000 female advisors in St James’s Place. We’re delighted about that, but I’m looking forward to that being a much higher number going forward, because I think the opportunity is so real. The average age of our advisor is 46, the average age of the adviser coming out of the academy is 37 and from all different races, creeds, backgrounds, We collectively need to represent the society that we operate in, because I think that’s how we become a more inclusive (in the conventional sense of the word) offering and support to people. We connect with more communities, and we demonstrate what we can do and we can help people grow and help people develop.

HH: I’d be interested in hearing about what is the role of AI within businesses? What’s the opportunity? Where do you see the threat? And of course, your business, you have financial planning, portfolio management, asset management, you have so many different facets to the business.

MF:  I do believe technology will sit alongside and support and improve the efficacy of advisers. Most technology, most models today, most AI engines are probabilistic – they’re inference engines. Most of what you do is going to require deterministic engine. It’s rules based. You need to be able to trace things back in terms of the rules from the FCA handbook and the different characteristics and perspectives of the different investments that you suggest to your clients.

But technology, I think, will be able to help fulfil and ease a lot of the things that act as a drag on your day, and a lot of the admin work, I think will get simplified. But if I think of the research that we’ve done that indicates that 92% of people say if I’m going to go down the advice route, I want to have human that I’m getting advice from. What we are seeing is actually people using technology, using different AI engines, chatbots, etc, to research some things first, then going into the conversation with with the adviser with a little spring in their step, because they’ve got two or three questions that they wouldn’t have had themselves.

But I think the job of the advisor there is to help them understand whether they truly understood the question they asked and definitely did they understand the answer that the kit gave them?  Because somebody said whether it’s open AI or chat GPT or it’s a combination of a parrot and a Labrador, it will repeat back what it hears along the way. And the Labrador is there because it’s desperately keen that you like it. So it has a built-in bias towards things that you like or don’t like. And if you give it a thumbs up, it’ll reinforce that behaviour. It’s the way the algorithms are built. But I do think that technology will be able to help and support.

But in a world where there’s a question about the trust of the underlying data, in a world where actually people are talking to you about their hopes, their fears, their anxieties, their family relationships, it’s a brave person to put all of that into an engine. But also when the proverbial hits the fan, people know that you’re there and that you matter. So the way we are looking at AI is spending a lot of money  on how we make the kit talk better with one another, how we facilitate the preparation of meetings, the write-up of the meetings. The meeting itself is being recorded and then gets transcribed. But it’s a human-to-human interaction, and that is really, really important. In time, I expect the kit during the conversation to be able to prompt the adviser, quietly, script wise, to say you should ask this question.

HH: Finally, what does our industry get wrong and what are you trying to do differently?

MF: So a few years ago, the industry went through a massive change and really started to become a lot more of a profession – it’s a very young profession. I think we need to do collectively more to make it more attractive to bring people in. I don’t think the profession has done enough to actually make it sufficiently attractive for people to come in and play a collective role in that. I think that’s really, really important, because I don’t want to end up like Australia, where they have so few advisers that the advisers can cherry pick clients based on FUM and based on how much they can earn off those clients. Second is making the profession far more representative of the society in which we operate. That’s a very, very important par. Also, how do we innovate within the profession? Because innovation needs to come from within as well as outside. I’m not sure I’ve seen a huge amount of innovation from within and I would really encourage people to be more innovative in terms of what we do, how we do it, how we talk about what we do as well. So I think it’s a great profession to be in, and one that’s truly growing — unlike almost any other part of financial system. It is different in that regard. And advisers are in scarce supply. So the demand/supply equation makes price very interesting. But the need in the UK is so large. We have to get people talking about money. We have to get people understanding it more. We have to get them  thinking about investing. We have to get the money from under the mattress and get it working. That’s good for them. It’s good for you. It’s good for the country.