Why Total Wealth Planners need to change the centre of their practice
By Steve Conley, Founder, Academy of Life Planning
12 October 2026
A person asks for help making sense of retirement. Before long, the conversation turns to pension consolidation, investment funds, regulated advice and what the Financial Conduct Authority will allow.
But the person’s question may have been much bigger. Can I reduce my working hours? What happens if my partner needs care? Could I earn differently? What do I want these next twenty years to be for?
Somewhere along the way, a question about a life has become a question about a financial product.
I see this tendency among people learning to practise total wealth planning. They care about doing good work. They want to be responsible. Yet they keep returning to FCA-regulated activities as though those activities sit at the centre of the profession, with everything else arranged around them.
We need to put that inherited belief into perspective.
The FCA perimeter is one of the professional boundaries we need to understand. It is not the centre of total wealth planning.
In the Academy’s approach, members need to understand more than 70 professional boundaries. Across the work, questions can arise about law, taxation, health, mental health, employment, safeguarding, data protection and many other areas. Those boundaries differ: some concern legally reserved activities, others concern competence, ethics or appropriate specialist involvement. They are not all licences, and they do not all operate in the same way.
The task is to recognise which boundaries matter to the person’s situation. Becoming absorbed by one of them can leave us overlooking both the others and the work the person actually needs.
An innocent belief can still narrow a profession.
Many practitioners have learned, directly or indirectly, that financial planning culminates in a recommendation about investments, pensions or insurance. The conversation discovers the need. The plan establishes the rationale. The product transaction becomes the visible outcome.
For businesses earning revenue from assets under management or product distribution, that sequence has a commercial logic. It can also train people to look for solutions where their business gets paid.
My concern is what happens when we carry that sequence into a profession built around human agency.
Remove the product recommendation, but leave the old mental model intact, and the practitioner can feel that the most valuable part of the job has been taken away. They start asking how close they can get to the perimeter. Can they narrow the fund list? Can they guide a transfer? Can a disclaimer make the next step acceptable?
I think we need to ask a prior question: why has the work arrived at that step?
What would we see if we started with the person’s life?
A client approaching retirement may need to understand existing scheme benefits, reconcile household spending, explore part-time work, discuss caring responsibilities and agree what enough means with their partner. They may need to organise scattered records and test whether their assumptions make sense.
These are substantial outcomes. Their value does not depend on moving money.
The same applies to someone changing career, rebuilding after financial exploitation, living with uncertain income or questioning whether their current way of working is sustainable. The most useful next step could concern earning capacity, confidence, housing, relationships or health.
A Total Wealth Planner should be able to recognise that value and explain it clearly.
Total wealth includes financial resources, but also the human capacity to earn and adapt, the relationships that sustain us, the environment we depend on, and the purpose and values that guide our choices. Life, mind, body, heart and spirit belong in the conversation because they affect what a person can do with the resources they have.
This breadth requires professional discipline. It does not make us doctors, solicitors, therapists or tax specialists. It asks us to understand enough to recognise a relevant question, help the person prepare, and involve appropriate expertise when needed.
We should apply the same discipline to financial questions.
FCA authorisation concerns permission to undertake specified regulated activities. It should not be treated as a universal certificate of expertise in every matter involving money. Equally, working outside a particular regulated activity does not make someone competent to undertake every other kind of work.
An NHS pension member’s McCloud remedy choice illustrates the distinction. Their question may concern the scheme benefits shown in a Remediable Service Statement. Expertise in NHS scheme rules and the remedy is relevant. Permission to advise on pension transfers does not, by itself, establish that expertise.
The FCA’s own guidance distinguishes advice concerning occupational scheme benefits from regulated investment advice, while separately addressing transfers and conversions of safeguarded benefits. The details of the scheme and activity matter. “Pension” is not one uniform regulatory category.[1]
We should therefore ask what expertise the question requires, rather than treating an authorisation label as the complete answer.
There is also a useful distinction between understanding an arrangement and replacing it.
Suppose someone wants to know whether their workplace pension supports fossil fuel extraction. Valuable work could begin with identifying the scheme, understanding its investment arrangements and examining its disclosures. Where the member has investment choices, they can explore the available options, charges, risks and retirement arrangements. They may also consider stewardship and engagement alongside exclusion.
If the scheme offers no suitable option, a meaningful outcome could be a clear understanding of that limitation and a well-prepared request to the provider or trustees. Defined benefit members, who generally cannot choose the investments backing their promised benefits, may need a different route through enquiry and engagement.
We do not have to turn dissatisfaction into a transfer journey to prove that the work was useful.
That is a choice about the scope of a service. It does not claim that every transfer is wrong, or that every conversation about an existing scheme falls outside regulation. It recognises that a guide or engagement can have a worthwhile purpose without becoming a route to another product.
The regulatory framework itself leaves room for that perspective. PERG 8.26.2 includes financial planning among examples of generic advice not caught by Article 53(1). But this is not a blanket exemption for anything called planning: generic advice can still constitute a financial promotion, and particular activities can bring other requirements into play.[2]
Understand the boundary. Design the work around its purpose.
The business question follows from this.
If a planner believes that value resides mainly in selecting products or moving assets, they will struggle to describe and charge for work that produces neither. They may discount the capability-building work, offer it away, or treat it as a preliminary conversation before the “real” service begins.
We need to make its outcomes visible.
A person now understands the assumptions in their plan. A household has agreed spending priorities. Someone has prepared accurate questions for a specialist. A client has compared possible working lives, made a decision and recorded why. Another has identified a mistake before acting on it.
These outcomes can be described, scoped and reviewed. They give the client something concrete for their fee.
AI strengthens the opportunity. It can help people organise information, explore scenarios and prepare questions, provided outputs are checked. A planner can help the person use those capabilities thoughtfully, recognise uncertainty and bring in expertise where the consequences warrant it.
In the Academy ecosystem, Total Wealth Plans provides the AI operating system; the Total Wealth Planner provides human support. The person retains ownership of their records, plan and decisions. Human expertise can be episodic while their ability to operate their own plan develops continuously.
The planner of the future will not be the client’s operating system. They will help the client operate one.
That requires a different measure of professional success. We should ask whether the person is better able to understand, choose and act. Confidence alone is insufficient: can they explain the assumptions, test an alternative, recognise a limit and identify their next step?
For members wanting to reset their practice, I suggest one exercise:
If this client bought no financial product, transferred no pension and changed no investment, what valuable outcomes could your work still produce?
Write down three. For each, describe the client’s problem, the work you would undertake, the relevant professional boundaries and what the client would be able to do afterwards.
If that exercise feels difficult, it reveals where your development needs to begin. You may still be looking at a whole life through the lens of a product business.
Our profession should be capable of seeing more.
Start with the person’s life. Establish what matters. Identify the work needed and the boundaries relevant to it. Bring in specialist expertise where required, while keeping the person involved in understanding and owning the decisions.
Your client’s life is bigger than the FCA perimeter. Your practice should be too.
Sources
[1] FCA Handbook PERG 10.4, particularly Q39; NHSBSA Making your remedy choice.
[2] FCA Handbook PERG 8.26, particularly 8.26.1, 8.26.2 and 8.26.5.
The reference to more than 70 professional boundaries describes the Academy’s approach to professional scope; it is not a claim that UK law defines a single list of 70 regulated professions. Regulatory sources checked on 12 October 2026.
