What disability rights, FCA regulation and financial planning can teach us about restoring human agency

Most people, some of the time, will struggle to make an important decision.

Not because they are incapable.

Because life happens.

Bereavement. Illness. Divorce. Redundancy. Scam victimisation. Retirement. Debt. Cognitive overload. A complex pension decision. A court dispute. A financial product whose design and language are understood far better by the institution selling it than by the person buying it.

The Financial Conduct Authority already recognises this.

Its vulnerability framework says anyone can find themselves in vulnerable circumstances at any time. Its definition encompasses health, life events, resilience and capability, and the regulator expects firms to adapt communications and support so customers can understand their choices and achieve outcomes comparable with other consumers.

That sounds remarkably close to an idea developed much more explicitly in disability rights:

supported decision-making.

And it raises an uncomfortable question for financial services.

If regulation says people experiencing reduced capability should receive more support so they can make informed decisions, why has the dominant financial-advice model evolved around something much closer to continuous substituted judgement?

Why does temporary complexity so often become a permanent adviser relationship?

And why is that relationship so often financed by an ongoing percentage of the person’s assets?

Disability rights discovered something profound about autonomy

For much of history, disability was treated paternalistically.

If somebody was considered unable to make a “good” decision, somebody else would make it for them.

The modern human-rights movement has challenged that assumption.

Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is concerned with equal recognition before the law. The UN Committee has argued strongly for replacing substituted decision-making arrangements with supported decision-making that respects the person’s autonomy, will and preferences.

The distinction matters.

Substituted judgement asks:

“What should we decide for this person?”

Supported decision-making asks:

“What support does this person need to understand, express and act on their own wishes?”

The first can remove personhood from the decision.

The second tries to preserve it.

That is why agency matters.

Human dignity is not satisfied merely because somebody knowledgeable reaches a technically good decision on your behalf.

There is value in you remaining the author of your own life.

Financial regulation already contains the same idea

The FCA does not generally respond to customers experiencing vulnerability by saying:

“Take their decisions away.”

Its own guidance points in the opposite direction.

Firms should make information understandable, adapt communications, offer appropriate channels, make consumers aware of support, and respond to individual needs.

Under the Consumer Duty, firms must support consumers to make informed decisions, provide information at the right time and in a form they can understand, and test whether communications enable effective decision-making.

That is fundamentally a capability-building philosophy.

The objective is not merely to ensure that paperwork exists.

It is to improve the conditions in which the person exercises judgement.

Which leads to a better way of thinking about vulnerability.

Stop thinking about “vulnerable people”

The expression can unintentionally create a misleading category:

vulnerable people over there; normal people over here.

The FCA itself says circumstances can make any of us more susceptible to harm at different points in our lives. Bereavement is explicitly recognised as one such circumstance.

So perhaps the more useful formulation is:

Most people, some of the time.

Capability is contextual.

A senior executive can understand corporate strategy but feel completely lost after their spouse dies.

A mathematician can calculate probabilities but know almost nothing about pension regulation.

A financially literate person can still be overwhelmed after being defrauded.

A solicitor can understand the law while knowing very little about investment products.

People are not permanently “vulnerable”.

They encounter situations in which the capability required by the environment exceeds the capability they can presently bring to it.

That is:

Capability asymmetry

One side possesses substantially greater knowledge, analytical capacity, institutional resources or familiarity with the system than the other.

That is especially common in financial services.

The provider may have lawyers, actuaries, product specialists, compliance teams, behavioural data and decades of accumulated institutional knowledge.

The consumer may have a PDF.

Formal choice is not the same as meaningful autonomy

Financial services often answers concerns about adviser power with:

“The client remains free to reject the recommendation.”

Legally, that matters.

Practically, it can be almost beside the point.

Imagine an adviser understands tax, investment products, pension legislation, markets, risk modelling and the firm’s own charging structure.

The client does not.

The adviser investigates the client’s circumstances, selects the assumptions, performs the analysis, determines what is “suitable”, explains the recommendation and arranges its implementation.

The consumer signs.

Formally:

the client decided.

But did they really author the judgement?

Could they meaningfully interrogate the assumptions?

Understand the alternatives?

Recognise omissions?

Estimate the long-term cost?

Understand the adviser’s economic incentives?

Know whether another perfectly legitimate pathway existed?

There can therefore be a substantial difference between:

formal autonomy — I was allowed to say no

and

meaningful autonomy — I had enough capability to make the decision genuinely mine.

That is the same philosophical territory disability rights has been wrestling with for decades.

Financial advice can become substituted judgement without legal substitution

We should use the terminology carefully.

A regulated financial adviser is not normally a legal substitute decision-maker in the Mental Capacity Act sense.

The client retains legal authority.

But the professional relationship can nevertheless operate through what I would call:

Substituted judgement

The expert performs the substantive cognitive work and tells the consumer what they should do.

For some decisions, that may be exactly what the consumer wants.

There is nothing inherently wrong with expertise, recommendation or delegation.

The problem arises when capability asymmetry becomes a permanent commercial model.

Instead of asking:

“How do we help this person become more capable?”

the system asks:

“How do we continue providing the judgement?”

And the economics matter.

Follow the incentive

The FCA permits advisers to charge through fixed fees, hourly fees, percentage charges or combinations of these. It does not mandate asset-based pricing.

But ongoing advice dominates the market.

The FCA’s 2025 financial-adviser survey reported that 88% of retail clients receive ongoing advice, and described ongoing advice as the “backbone” of the market, with around 90% of clients placed into such arrangements. Firms responding to that survey advised approximately £1 trillion of assets.

The FCA’s separate ongoing-services review reported that about 80% of adviser-charge revenue came from ongoing services covering around four million clients.

The rules explicitly contemplate ongoing charges expressed as a percentage of funds under management.

That creates an obvious incentive question.

If your income continues while the client remains under ongoing advice, and may rise as the assets increase, what economic incentive exists to make the client progressively less dependent upon you?

That does not prove misconduct.

It does reveal a structural conflict.

A capability-building model succeeds when the person needs less routine help.

A continuing-intermediation model succeeds commercially when the relationship persists.

Those incentives point in different directions.

This is where “vulnerability” can become commercial opportunity

The FCA itself has previously warned that vulnerability may sometimes be positively exploited for gain.

That is an extraordinarily important observation.

Imagine someone has just been bereaved.

They experience brain fog.

They are overwhelmed by financial paperwork.

Their confidence collapses.

There are two possible professional responses.

The first:

“You cannot comfortably handle this. I will manage the financial decisions for you. We will put your investments under ongoing advice and charge you every year.”

The second:

“You are going through something difficult. Let us slow this down, make the information understandable, structure the decisions, help you act, and gradually rebuild your confidence.”

Both are forms of help.

Only one necessarily builds agency.

Lisa’s story

We have a real example.

Lisa came to me after being widowed.

In her own words:

“my bereavements meant I suffered from brain fog, so found it hard to grasp things.”

A previous financial adviser had proposed fees she regarded as “eye-watering” and, in her words, would ultimately have amounted to something like handing over “the keys to my flat”.

What did Lisa actually need?

Not a lifetime of substituted financial judgement.

She needed cognitive support during an exceptionally difficult period.

We worked through things patiently.

We structured the decisions.

I explained what she was looking at.

She learned how she could use FSCS-protected arrangements and straightforward investment products.

Our meetings created enough structure to help her move forward.

And then Lisa wrote the sentence that matters most:

“I was … empowered to make decisions about my financial planning.”

That is an Agency Outcome.

The life event was bereavement.

The immediate consequence was reduced cognitive bandwidth.

The intervention was support.

The outcome was increased capability.

Not increased dependency.

A temporary reduction in capability should not become somebody else’s lifetime business model

That is the lesson.

Lisa was not fundamentally incapable.

Her circumstances had changed.

What she needed from a professional was a bridge.

From:

overwhelmed

to:

understanding

to:

choosing

to:

acting

to:

independence.

That is supported decision-making.

And it gives us a different definition of professional success.

What if planners were measured by agency gained?

The FCA’s 2025 ongoing-services exercise asked 22 large advice firms for information about whether promised suitability reviews had been delivered. The FCA reported around 83% delivered, with a further 15% where clients declined or did not respond. It also expressly cautioned that the sample was not representative.

That tells us something about reported service delivery.

It tells us much less about whether the interaction:

increased understanding;

improved decision capability;

reduced unnecessary dependency;

generated proportionate value;

or enabled the client to manage future decisions more independently.

Those are different questions.

We can record that a review happened.

But:

Was personhood strengthened?

That should matter too.

I would call this the:

Agency Outcome

After receiving professional support:

Is the person more capable of understanding, choosing and acting for themselves than they were before?

That could become a much more meaningful measure of consumer benefit.

The Academy model starts from the opposite incentive

The Academy of Life Planning is deliberately building around capability rather than dependency.

The assumption is not:

“Complex money decisions require permanent expert control.”

It is:

“Most people, most of the time, can make far more of their own decisions if they have the right cognitive assistance.”

That assistance can take different forms.

AI can explain.

Tools can calculate.

Education can build knowledge.

Communities can share experience.

A Total Wealth Planner can provide human judgement, context, challenge and reassurance.

Specialists can be brought in where specialist expertise is genuinely required.

But the citizen remains the principal.

That is the crucial difference.

The Total Wealth Planner as cognitive assistant

A Total Wealth Planner should not aim to own the client’s decisions.

The planner’s job is to improve the client’s ability to own them.

That means helping someone:

understand what is happening;

surface assumptions;

recognise trade-offs;

distinguish facts from interpretation;

model consequences;

identify what they do not know;

decide where professional expertise is genuinely required;

and ultimately act according to their own goals and values.

That is a very different professional identity from the permanent intermediary.

The objective is not:

assets under advice.

It is:

agency gained.

And that changes how we should pay planners

Charging by assets creates an unusual relationship between the cost of cognitive assistance and the size of somebody’s investment portfolio.

Why should explaining the same decision necessarily cost ten times as much because one person has ten times as much money invested?

Sometimes complexity genuinely increases with wealth.

Often it does not increase proportionately.

The Academy therefore favours transparent payment for the work and support actually required rather than assuming that the planner should permanently participate economically in the client’s accumulated capital.

Fixed fees.

Hourly support.

Episodic help.

More assistance during complexity.

Less assistance when capability returns.

That aligns payment more closely with the intervention.

Most importantly, it permits an outcome that an asset-retention model struggles to celebrate:

“You don’t need me anymore.”

Or more realistically:

“You don’t need me continuously. Come back when I add value.”

That is not commercial failure.

For an agency-restoration profession, it is success.

Regulation says support. The market too often hears intermediation.

This is the contradiction.

FCA vulnerability policy says:

understand people’s circumstances;

adapt to their needs;

make information understandable;

provide appropriate support;

enable informed decisions.

The market frequently translates complexity into:

personal recommendation;

implementation;

ongoing advice;

assets under advice;

continuous fees.

The first philosophy is:

increase capability.

The second can become:

institutionalise dependency.

They are not the same thing.

We need to move beyond paternalism

There is a wider human-rights lesson here.

The history of disability policy demonstrates the danger of confusing protection with control.

Paternalism says:

“We know what is best for you.”

Supported decision-making says:

“We will help you exercise your own will and preferences.”

That same distinction belongs in financial services.

Not because consumers should never use advisers.

Not because everyone should become their own investment specialist.

Not because expertise is unnecessary.

But because professional expertise should not automatically extinguish personal authorship.

We should distinguish:

advice that replaces judgement

from:

assistance that strengthens judgement.

That is what we mean by:

Agency rather than advice.

Not “never listen to advice”.

Not “never delegate”.

But:

do not surrender agency unnecessarily.

The Right to Cognitive Assistance

That leads directly to the principle the Academy is now proposing:

The Right to Cognitive Assistance is the right of every person to access lawful human, technological and collective support that increases their capacity to understand, choose and act, while preserving their autonomy, will and decision authority.

Disability rights gives us the precedent.

FCA vulnerability policy gives us the regulatory logic.

AI gives us the opportunity to provide cognitive assistance at extraordinary scale.

And financial planning gives us a test case.

The question is whether we use those capabilities to create another layer of dependence —

or to help people become more capable.

Our position is clear.

Regulation says most consumers, some of the time, need more support.

The market too often interprets that as more intermediation, continuously.

We should interpret it as more capability, always.

Because meaningful autonomy requires more than a signature at the bottom of somebody else’s recommendation.

It requires enough capability to understand the decision.

Enough support to question it.

Enough confidence to choose.

And enough freedom to act.

That is what it means to author your own life.

Protection without agency creates dependency.

Support that builds capability creates resilience.

And the proper measure of a financial planner should not simply be how long the client stays.

It should also be:

Did we leave the person more capable than we found them?

That is the Academy model.

Advice out. Agency in.