A World of Change
I have to say, teaching at Palmers VIth form college certainly feels like a long time ago. If I’ve carried anything with me from that time however, it’s that you never stop learning.
The World has changed dramatically since I decided to become a financial adviser, and not least of all in the past few years. We have an aging population (me included!) and pressures on the state that are making it increasingly difficult to save for a secure future. As a result, more and more people want and need advice, but an increasingly complex regulatory environment means there are less advisers than ever before. The SARS-Covid-19 pandemic simply piled more pressure on top. Delivering consistently positive outcomes for our clients has become more difficult and complex to say the least. Clearly, the lesson here was that something had to change.
Key Points
Key information:
- The World has changed dramatically over the past decade.
- The delivery of financial advice has become increasingly complex.
Change was essential to ensure continued positive outcomes for our clients.
A Lesson Learned
Having taken the time to reflect on my term in financial services, I concluded that while an ‘A’ star for effort was in order, the report card must read ‘could do better’ for our clients. The practice of advice has hardly evolved since I started, the cracks were shown by the pandemic, and we had to evolve.
The increasing pace of change means we required highly systematic, evidence-based advice processes, which not only takes account of where we are now, but also anticipates the key events and influences we may face in the future. Technology is clearly a key influence and we needed to embrace its capacity to empower the advice process. In this context, we also needed a more flexible service proposition which can accommodate both sophisticated planning, while reducing barriers to the more fundamental solutions whose low margins had been making them untenable. Finally, it is essential that we encourage families to work together to create lasting financial security, and that we leverage the collective strength of our practice to support this process.
Key Points
Key information:
- The increasing pace of change demands a new approach to advice.
- We need to focus more on helping families build security together.
We are now positioned to deliver and exciting, new vision for our practice.
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