We regulate the difference between information, education, guidance, promotion and financial advice. Perhaps it is time we taught the public the difference too.
BIG Checker doesn’t just ask “Is this true?”
It asks “What is this, who benefits, and why should you believe it?”
More than half of people who acted on financial advice they encountered on social media lost money.
That is the striking headline from research by TSB reported by FT Adviser.
According to the research:
- 32% of respondents had acted on financial advice on social media during the previous 12 months.
- Of those who acted, 56% lost money.
- Their average loss was £690.46.
- 59% subsequently regretted acting.
- 56% of people who had seen financial advice on social media said they trusted it.
- Among 25–34-year-olds, that trust figure rose to 72%.
- 49% of 25–34-year-olds had acted on social-media financial advice.
- One in four respondents had used AI for financial advice, rising to 43% among 25–34-year-olds.
- Yet 51% said they were not confident they could identify AI-generated financial content.
Those numbers should concern us.
But perhaps they should concern us for a slightly different reason from the obvious one.
Because before asking whether people received bad financial advice, there is another question we ought to ask:
What exactly did they receive?
“Financial advice” can mean almost anything in ordinary conversation
Someone watches a TikTok explaining compound interest.
Someone reads a newspaper article comparing pensions and ISAs.
Someone asks ChatGPT how diversification works.
Someone watches a YouTuber explain why they like a particular investment.
Someone sees an influencer being paid to promote a trading platform.
Someone tells an authorised financial adviser about their circumstances and receives a recommendation to invest in a particular fund.
Ask ordinary people what happened in each case and many may describe all six as:
“I got some financial advice.”
Legally and functionally, however, they are very different activities.
That matters.
The UK financial regulatory system draws careful distinctions between communications precisely because different activities create different responsibilities, conflicts and consumer protections.
Yet we have constructed a system in which professionals are expected to understand those distinctions while the public the system is supposed to protect is largely left to guess.
At present, remarkably, we regulate these distinctions far more carefully than we teach them.
Perhaps that needs to change.
Six things that can look like “financial advice”
Here is a simple citizen’s guide.
1. Information
Information tells you what is.
An interest rate.
A pension rule.
A fund charge.
A historical return.
The terms of a mortgage.
It provides facts without necessarily telling you what conclusion to reach.
Information can still be incomplete, selectively presented or misleading. But its basic function is descriptive.
Question to ask:
Is this telling me a fact, or steering me towards a conclusion?
2. Education
Education helps you understand how something works.
It might explain diversification, inflation, investment risk, tax wrappers, pension drawdown or the effect of charges.
Good financial education increases your capacity to make decisions rather than making the decision for you.
That distinction is central to the Academy of Life Planning.
The purpose of education should not be to create dependence upon the educator.
It should make the learner progressively more capable.
Question to ask:
Do I understand more after receiving this than I did before?
3. Guidance
Guidance helps you explore what you might consider.
It can explain options, trade-offs, questions to ask and things worth thinking about without determining that one particular course of action is right for you.
Good guidance enlarges the decision space.
It helps you think.
It should not quietly become a substitute for thinking.
Question to ask:
Is this helping me explore my options, or choosing between them for me?
4. Promotion
Promotion is different again.
Its purpose is generally to encourage an action.
Buy this.
Open this account.
Transfer here.
Invest in this opportunity.
Follow this strategy.
Someone may educate while promoting. They may provide genuine information while promoting. They may even sincerely believe in what they are promoting.
But the incentive has changed.
That is why financial promotion is regulated.
The FCA says financial promotions on social media must be fair, clear and not misleading, provide a balanced view of benefits and risks, and help consumers make effective, well-informed decisions. It also warns that unauthorised influencers promoting regulated financial products without the required approval may be committing a criminal offence.
Question to ask:
Who benefits if I do what this communication encourages me to do?
5. Regulated advice
Now we enter another territory.
Certain forms of advice concerning regulated financial products and activities fall within the regulatory perimeter.
This matters because regulated advice carries duties, permissions and potential protections that ordinary information or commentary does not.
It is therefore dangerous to assume that because somebody sounds knowledgeable, has a large following or calls themselves an expert, they have entered into a regulated advisory relationship with you.
The FCA has already taken significant action against finfluencers suspected of illegally promoting financial products. Its guidance makes clear that social media does not exist outside financial-services law merely because the communication happens on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or another digital platform.
Question to ask:
Is this person authorised to provide the regulated service I believe I am receiving?
6. Personal recommendation
A personal recommendation goes further.
Someone considers information about you and recommends a particular course of action as suitable for you.
That changes the relationship substantially.
The message is no longer merely:
“Here is something you could consider.”
It becomes much closer to:
“Given your circumstances, this is what I recommend you do.”
For somebody who genuinely wants to delegate investment judgement, that can be entirely appropriate.
But delegation should be conscious.
You should understand that you have moved from gathering intelligence towards relying upon another party’s judgement.
Question to ask:
Am I still making this decision, or have I consciously appointed someone else to recommend it for me?
The problem may be bigger than bad advice
Return to the TSB research.
If respondents really received regulated investment advice from people who were not authorised to provide it, we potentially have a regulatory problem.
But suppose something else happened.
Suppose many respondents encountered commentary, education, advertising, opinions, affiliate marketing or generic discussion — and interpreted it as financial advice.
Then we have a different public-policy problem.
People do not understand what they are receiving.
And that is dangerous too.
I call this the Advice Attribution Problem.
A person encounters financial content.
They perceive expertise.
They attribute authority to the communicator.
Then they act.
The crucial behavioural event is not necessarily that somebody formally advised them.
It is that the citizen treated the communication as authoritative.
The internet does not need to formally appoint itself as your adviser.
You can appoint it yourself.
Influence is not expertise. Expertise is not authority.
Social media makes this particularly important because modern platforms are extraordinarily good at manufacturing perceived authority.
Followers.
Likes.
Professional production.
Confidence.
Luxury lifestyles.
Testimonials.
Algorithmic repetition.
Apparent consensus.
None tells you whether the underlying argument is true.
And none tells you whether acting upon it is right for you.
The FCA itself has warned about the trust placed in finfluencers. In earlier FCA research, nearly two-thirds of 18–29-year-olds followed social-media influencers; among those followers, 74% said they trusted their advice and nine in ten had been encouraged to change their financial behaviour.
The problem, therefore, isn’t merely financial literacy.
It is authority literacy.
Who am I allowing to influence this decision?
Why do I trust them?
What evidence have they supplied?
What have they omitted?
What incentives might they have?
What assumptions are hidden inside the argument?
And ultimately:
Who gets to decide?
This is where AI can help — if we use it differently
The instinctive institutional response to unreliable online information is often:
“Don’t trust the internet. Speak to a professional.”
Sometimes that is sensible.
But it also preserves an outdated binary:
DIY or adviser.
There is now another possibility.
People can use AI, technology, education and professional expertise to improve the quality of their thinking while retaining decision authority themselves.
That is the opportunity the Academy of Life Planning is pursuing.
The goal isn’t to replace one authority with another.
It isn’t:
“Don’t trust the influencer. Trust the AI.”
It is:
Use technology to strengthen your agency.
Technology can gather information.
AI can explain unfamiliar concepts.
Tools can model scenarios.
Experts can contribute knowledge.
Professionals can challenge your assumptions.
But none automatically needs to become your decision authority.
Before believing the narrative, check it
This is also why we created BIG Checker™.
Financial influence rarely arrives labelled:
“WARNING: THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS SELECTIVE FRAMING.”
It arrives as a plausible story.
A headline.
A press release.
An investment argument.
An adviser brochure.
A regulatory announcement.
A confident LinkedIn post.
A TikTok video.
BIG Checker helps you examine that narrative before accepting it.
Paste in a financial communication, article, promotion, public statement or URL and use AI to look for:
- hidden assumptions
- missing information
- persuasive framing
- institutional incentives
- unsupported conclusions
- the distinction between evidence, opinion and promotion.
It doesn’t decide whether the argument is right for you.
That would defeat the purpose.
It helps you ask better questions so you can decide.
BIG Checker describes itself as analysing “language, framing & assumptions only” rather than providing legal or financial advice.
You can try it at bigchecker.app.
A new piece of financial education: know what you’re receiving
Perhaps this belongs alongside budgeting, pensions, investing and compound interest in basic financial education.
Before acting upon any financial communication, citizens should learn to ask:
What am I receiving?
Is it:
Information — telling me what is?
Education — helping me understand?
Guidance — helping me explore?
Promotion — trying to persuade me?
Regulated advice — an activity carrying regulatory responsibilities?
A personal recommendation — somebody applying judgement to my circumstances and recommending what I should do?
And then one final question:
Who has decision authority?
There is nothing wrong with delegation.
Sometimes the sensible exercise of agency is to employ somebody with specialist expertise and consciously delegate part of the decision.
But that is very different from accidentally delegating your judgement to somebody because an algorithm placed their video in your feed.
Intelligence is abundant. Agency must be learned.
Social media is not going away.
AI certainly isn’t going away.
Financial information will become more abundant, more personalised and more persuasive.
Trying to protect people simply by telling them which sources they are allowed to trust will therefore become increasingly difficult.
We need something stronger.
People need the capacity to understand what they are receiving, interrogate the narrative, recognise incentives, test evidence and consciously determine who gets to make the decision.
That leads to a simple principle for the age of AI:
Use technology for intelligence.
Use agency for authority.
Delegate consciously.
Because the most important question may no longer be:
“Was this financial advice?”
It may be:
“Why did I allow it to decide for me?”
Before you judge the advice, identify what you’re actually receiving.
BIG Checker™ now does more than examine the claims, framing and incentives inside a financial communication.
Every report includes a What Are You Receiving? assessment.
It classifies the communication across six categories:
Information • Education • Guidance • Promotion • Regulated Advice • Personal Recommendation
Each category is marked Present, Primary or Not Present, with an explanation of why.
This matters because one of the biggest risks online is not simply receiving poor information. It is misunderstanding the kind of communication you are receiving and giving it more authority than it deserves.
A promotion can contain useful education. Guidance can feel like advice. An influencer’s opinion can feel like a recommendation. A polished communication can acquire authority it has never earned.
BIG Checker makes those distinctions visible before you act.
First understand the message. Then understand what kind of message it is. Only then decide what authority you want to give it.
BIG Checker™ is a free Academy of Life Planning tool for analysing the framing, assumptions and incentives contained in financial communications.
Try BIG Checker™: bigchecker.app
Academy of Life Planning — Advice out. Agency in.
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