Last weekend I found myself on the South Wales coast, reconnecting with my graduating class of 1995 at UWC Atlantic. Thirty years on, and I felt more deeply connected to this group of people from all over the world than I have since we were 18.

There’s something incredibly profound about standing with the same people decades later, seeing how life has shaped each of us, and realising the threads that bind us together.

In the earlier years since we graduated, a lot of us were vying to find our place on the traditional path – a good university; employment; a life partner; start a family. This get-together felt like a pivot point in lots of our lives where we’re settled enough in ourselves to pursue what meaningful looks like to us in whatever form it happens to take.

We commented that we don’t feel like we’ve aged; that was until someone produced our old yearbook photos!

It wasn’t just the personal reconnection that has stayed with me from this weekend. A presentation by Atlantic College’s principal, Naheed Bardai, crystallised something I’d been thinking about for months.

The problem we’re all bad at

Naheed described the college’s journey to craft a new version of the IB diploma. One that dramatically shifts the educational approach towards what the world actually needs most, without losing any academic rigour. The new Systems Transformation Pathway programme is designed to prepare students to work with complex global challenges by understanding and intervening in systems. As an example, Naheed showed how you can’t attempt to resolve famine by learning about water or agriculture in a ‘silo’. You need to know about the politics and economics that impact that system just as much as the agricultural and environmental factors.

He presented striking research about changes to global systems and made an observation that hit me. (I’m paraphrasing; he was much more articulate.) “As humans, we’re astonishingly bad at looking at the data and really grasping what it’s showing us and the need for change.”

The pace of educational change, he noted, is vastly outstripped by the amount of change happening all around us in the world.

It’s one thing to see the data. It’s another to truly grasp its implications and act on them.

What does this have to do with financial planning?

Everything.

At NextWealth, we present data showing what needs to change in how our industry helps more people live with purpose and meaning through financial planning. We show how people’s lives are evolving, how the traditional blueprints don’t always apply, how what we define as wealth is shifting. And of course we talk a lot about the advice gap, the size and importance of the opportunity and how we can reimagine advice.

But are we, as an industry, really grasping what the data is showing us?

Our data enables us to show how people are taking sabbaticals at 40, creating alternative family structures, reimagining retirement as multiple phases rather than a “hard cliff-edge”, to quote from our annual retirement report. The old script (and the financial mechanics that underpinned it) of education – career – marriage – kids – retirement at 65, is becoming less relevant for a lot of people. People need financial planning in different ways and at different times.

We’re encouraged by our conversations every week with financial planning firms that are aspiring to do things differently; to meet changing client needs and expectations by trialling new advice models, testing different fee structures and communication strategies. Change is hard – much of the infrastructure was designed for an industry focused on distributing products rather than meeting client needs. Today our industry is only reaching 14% of the UK population with investable assets at a level that could be serviced by current advice models.

We won’t let it go either

Listening to Naheed describe how Atlantic College refused to accept that educational change should lag behind world change was deeply inspiring. They saw the gap and decided to close it.

We won’t let it go either.

We’re committed to helping get our insights seen, heard, and translated into action. We have so much to learn from global perspectives, and I’m excited about the conversations we’re having to bring insights from other countries where financial planning is valued and understood differently.

The data is clear: people’s lives are changing, what we define as wealth is changing, the old blueprints don’t apply.

The question is whether we’re brave enough to really grasp what that means, and act on it.

Julie Best, Insight Director at NextWealth