Over the past few weeks we sat down with nine senior decision-makers across wealth and advice, from a leader running a major tech transformation at a top wealth manager to the person in charge of adviser tools at one of the UK’s largest platforms. In one of our meetings we shared a list of emerging themes from the research and asked if any were on the interviewee’s agenda. He smiled: “All of them. This week.”

What we heard filled a thick file: what leaders are solving for right now, what’s blocking progress, and where the next practical wins are. The conversations ranged from propositions to plumbing:

• how to regain a stand-out client experience now that competitors have caught up;
• how planning tools should mirror real-life, goal-based pots with distinct purposes (the holiday fund versus the granddaughter’s university fund), and
• how to evidence value at scale, including for clients on every-other-year review cycles, without losing the human engagement in the “off year.”

We spoke to people upgrading dated, fragmented tech stacks; teams merging two substantial firms; proposition leads selecting tools for adviser users; and those focused on strengthening retirement propositions to serve more clients on more of their assets.

We were delighted to work with the team at Ortec Finance to consolidate these decision-makers’ brief to the market: Innovate with integrity – move faster where we can, add guardrails where we must, and make the essence of personal advice available to more people.

In such a fast-changing market with ambitions for growth; there’s huge appetite for something “different enough and credible enough to create that spark, to have anticipated the need and be the logical answer before the problem occurs.”

The report distils those conversations into five themes to spark new thinking and ideas. As one of our interviewees noted:

“The best tools challenge us to identify better ways of doing existing processes.”

Methodology

This report is informed by insight gathered from structured interviews with nine senior decision-makers in retail financial advice. Representatives were chosen from large advice firms, platforms, wealth managers and life, pensions and investment providers. Insight is supplemented by NextWealth’s market knowledge and wider conversations.

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