“Moving from restricted planning to whole-of-wealth planning isn’t a change of tools —
it’s a change of allegiance: from products to people.”Steve Conley
Academy of Life Planning
Why 2026 Is the Year the Profession Must Change
By Steve Conley | Academy of Life Planning | December 2025
For more than a decade, the Academy of Life Planning has argued that the future of financial services would not be decided by better products, faster platforms, or cleverer tax wrappers.
It would be decided by something far more fundamental:
Whether financial planning chose to become a true human profession — or remain an industrial sales function with better language.
This month, the evidence became impossible to ignore.
The Cerulli Signal: Planning Has Replaced Products as the Growth Engine
When Cerulli Associates released its U.S. Advisor Metrics 2025 report, one message stood out with remarkable clarity:
Financial planning — not product distribution — is now the primary driver of growth in wealth management.
Across the United States:
- Advisors now deliver an average of seven distinct services per client
- 4.5 of those are financial planning services
- Only 2.5 relate to advanced or product-adjacent planning
- The proportion of clients receiving no planning at all is expected to fall from 28% to 22% within two years
This is not a marginal shift.
It is a structural one.
Cerulli’s data shows that team-based, planning-led practices now manage three times more assets and grow twice as fast as lone-wolf, product-centric firms. Nearly a third already employ dedicated planning specialists.
In plain terms:
The market is rewarding depth of human planning — not volume of transactions.
The United States is not an outlier. It is a leading indicator.
What we are seeing there today is what Europe, the UK, Africa, and Asia are already beginning to feel.
From Financial Advice to Total Wealth Planning™
This trend confirms what many planners already sense intuitively — often uncomfortably.
The traditional advice model is running out of road.
Built around:
- Assets under management
- Product shelves
- Platform dependencies
- Manufacturer-aligned incentives
…it struggles to answer the questions clients are actually asking.
Not:
“Which fund should I buy?”
But:
- Who do I want to become?
- How do I live well — now, not just later?
- How does money support my values, my relationships, my purpose?
This is the territory of Total Wealth Planning™ — planning that integrates:
- Human capital
- Financial capital
- Social capital
- Meaning, purpose, and contribution
It is not anti-finance.
It is post-industrial finance.
Financial Planning 3.0 and the Human-to-Human Economy
This moment sits squarely within a lineage many in our profession already recognise.
The late Richard B. Wagner, JD, CFP® described money as “weird stuff” — deeply emotional, culturally loaded, and existentially charged. He argued that financial planning could become the most important profession of the 21st century if it severed its dependency on manufacturing and distribution.
Wagner called this evolution Financial Planning 3.0:
- Planning 1.0: product-centred
- Planning 2.0: comprehensive but captive
- Planning 3.0: a human profession, structurally independent
More recently, Partha Iyengar captured the same shift in different language, describing a “Fourth Revolution: the Human-to-Human Economy.”
An economy where:
- The primary unit of value is not a product
- Not a balance sheet
- But a human being and their potential
That framing matters.
Because it explains why the Cerulli data looks the way it does.
Human Capital Is No Longer a Footnote — It Is the Asset
In a Human-to-Human Economy, Human Capital becomes the core asset.
Not as a line in a cashflow model, but as lived reality:
- Skills and adaptability
- Health and energy
- Emotional resilience
- Relationships and community
- Capacity to learn, change, and recover
Traditional planning treats Human Capital as an assumption.
Total Wealth Planning treats it as the starting point.
This is why the fastest-growing practices are expanding their scope — not diluting it. They are helping clients fund learning, transitions, recovery, contribution, and meaning.
They are not “doing more”; they are planning more deeply.
AI Changes the Economics — Not the Essence — of Planning
Understandably, many advisers fear AI.
But the evidence points in the opposite direction.
AI does not replace the planner.
It replaces friction, admin, and cognitive overload.
Used consciously, AI:
- Speeds up data gathering
- Improves scenario modelling
- Reduces low-value administration
- Creates space for deeper human dialogue
At the Academy of Life Planning, the AI GAME Plan™ exists for precisely this reason: to amplify human wisdom, not automate it away.
In the Human-to-Human Economy:
- AI runs the spreadsheets
- Humans hold the space
That distinction is decisive.
Why This Moment Matters — Especially for Disgruntled IFAs
Many IFAs already feel the tension.
Between:
- Compliance pressure and professional purpose
- Product targets and client trust
- Industrial scale and human dignity
The Cerulli data doesn’t condemn anyone.
It simply reveals where the ground is moving.
By 2026, the profession will increasingly divide between:
- Those still optimising distribution
- And those building planning-led, values-driven practices
The question is no longer whether the shift will happen.
It is where you choose to stand.
The Academy of Life Planning: Training the Next Generation of Professionals
The Academy of Life Planning exists for planners who feel this shift in their bones.
We train:
- Total Wealth Planners™
- Financial Life Coaches
- Independent, product-free professionals
- Practitioners who place Human Capital first
- Planners who use AI ethically, transparently, and in service of autonomy
Not as a rejection of finance —
but as its maturation.
A Quiet Invitation
If the Cerulli findings resonate with you —
If Wagner’s vision of Financial Planning 3.0 feels unfinished —
If the Human-to-Human Economy sounds less like theory and more like home —
Then now is the moment to step forward.
Not noisily.
Not angrily.
But deliberately.
Explore the Academy of Life Planning.
Book a conversation.
Begin building a values-led practice for 2026.
Because the future of our profession will not be decided by technology alone.
It will be decided by those willing to place the human being back at the centre — and design everything else around that truth.
References
- Cerulli Associates (2025). U.S. Advisor Metrics 2025: Collaborating for Sustainable Organic Growth.
- Richard B. Wagner, JD, CFP®. Financial Planning 3.0: Evolving Our Relationships with Money.
- Kitces Values Summit (2025). Finology and the Higher Purpose of Financial Planning.
- InvestmentNews (2025). Team-Based Advisor Shops Trounce Lone-Wolf Practices.
Academy of Life Planning 