By Steve Conley, Founder, Academy of Life Planning | 4 November 2026
What if you could buy financial planning without agreeing to move your investments?
What if the price reflected the help you needed, rather than how much money you had?
And what if the person helping you had a reason to make you more capable, so you could do more for yourself?
That is the simplest explanation of the Academy of Life Planning.
Financial planning without asset hoovering.
This week’s Practice Management Circle brought that distinction into sharper focus. We discussed whether independent planning could provide a worthwhile livelihood without managing clients’ investments. There was disagreement. Some of it was uncomfortable. It was useful.
Because beneath the debate was a question the profession has been asking for forty years.
The objection was already there in 1986
On 14 October 1986, during the House of Lords debate on the Financial Services Bill, Lord Cameron of Lochbroom explained that someone restricting themselves to general advice, without mentioning particular investments, would not require authorisation under the proposed provisions.
Then he added:
“It scarcely seems likely that he could sustain a business doing so.”
There was the objection. Parliament recognised a distinction between general advice and advice about particular investments. The commercial question was whether someone could earn a living on the general side of that distinction. [1]
At the time, it was a perfectly reasonable question.
Planning took time. Information was harder to obtain. Calculations, administration and preparing reports involved considerable work. Finding customers willing to pay directly was difficult.
Product distribution offered another source of income. Over time, recurring charges against investments offered an especially attractive one.
The historical passage does not determine today’s regulatory boundaries. It does reveal how longstanding the economic challenge is.
How planning became attached to the assets
Financial planning covers a broad range of useful work: understanding someone’s life, clarifying priorities, exploring cash flow, preparing for retirement, considering family commitments, explaining financial concepts and identifying decisions that need specialist help.
People call this life planning, retirement planning, cash-flow planning, pension planning, business planning and many other things.
The work matters. But the way a business gets paid shapes the work it seeks.
When revenue depends on assets under management—AUM—the business has a powerful incentive to attract and retain those assets. Recurring charges can support remuneration, business investment and a saleable stream of future income.
The customer may arrive with a question about their life. The commercial model benefits when that question leads to a continuing relationship around their investments.
That is what I mean by asset hoovering: a model organised around bringing assets into the charging structure and keeping them there.
A person’s planning need and a firm’s asset-gathering need are different things.
Sometimes they coincide. The problem begins when the second determines how the first must be served.
I helped build these propositions
I came to this understanding from inside the industry.
Over three decades in senior pensions and investment roles, I worked in insurance companies and banks with thousands of advisers. Since then, I have spent years working with and talking to independent advisers and planners.
In 2005, at Berkeley Independent Advisers, I was involved in developing the Goldman Sachs Tactica proposition: risk-based, automatically rebalancing multi-asset portfolios.
I understand the attraction of these structures, their commercial logic and the arguments used to present them to customers.
A significant part of the consolidation story was compelling. Customers held expensive legacy investments. A new proposition could bring those assets together and use a cheaper, diversified investment approach. If the investment-cost saving exceeded the adviser’s charge, the customer could potentially be better off after fees without needing higher market returns.
That helped make the proposition saleable.
But an improvement at the point of transfer leaves a further question:
What continuing work justifies the continuing charge?
And why should the price of that work rise with the value of the customer’s investments?
The investment evidence matters
In June 2014, David Blake, Tristan Caulfield, Christos Ioannidis and Ian Tonks published New Evidence on Mutual Fund Performance: A Comparison of Alternative Bootstrap Methods.
Their research examined 516 UK domestic equity mutual funds over 1998–2008. Cass Business School’s account reported that 99% of managers could not deliver outperformance through stock selection or market timing. [2]
The original paper distinguishes between its two statistical methods: one found 95% failed to outperform the zero-skill distribution after fees; the other found almost all failed. Both identified a small group with superior ability whose fees absorbed the benefit, leaving investors without that superior performance. [3]
This is a specific historical finding, with a defined market, period and methodology. Its significance should neither be exaggerated into a universal statistic nor dismissed.
More recent SPIVA evidence continues to document widespread active-fund underperformance. Its Europe Year-End 2025 report found that most active equity funds underperformed in 18 of the 21 categories reported. Outcomes differed by category, including more favourable results for some bond funds. [4]
The practical question is why customers should assume that paying for investment selection will reliably buy superior results.
The consolidation industry itself has often recognised this problem by using lower-cost investment approaches.
Which brings us back to the charge attached to the relationship.
Adviser value is often planning value
When the investment-performance argument weakens, the conversation turns to the wider value advisers provide.
Quite rightly. Good human help can be valuable.
Vanguard’s Adviser’s Alpha framework includes financial planning, cost-conscious fund selection, asset allocation and behavioural coaching. Its current UK explanation says the frequently cited potential three percentage points of additional net return relates to an unspecified period and varies with the client’s circumstances. It is not a dependable extra 3% every year. [5]
Helping someone avoid a panicked decision can matter enormously. So can helping them organise their affairs, understand trade-offs or prepare for a difficult conversation.
Those benefits establish a case for useful expertise. They do not establish that every customer needs to pay for it through an indefinite percentage charge on their wealth.
A planner can teach the principles of diversification, costs and staying disciplined without gathering the customer’s portfolio. Where a decision requires a regulated recommendation or another specialist service, that need can be identified and addressed explicitly.
The customer should be able to understand which service they are purchasing and why.
AI changes both sides of the relationship
The first change is economic.
AI can assist with organising information, explaining terminology, summarising documents, drafting questions and exploring planning scenarios. Used carefully, it can reduce some of the routine effort previously involved in helping a person understand their position.
Human judgement still matters. So do checking, context and knowing when a specialist is needed. But the cost of producing useful understanding can change.
The second change concerns power.
A customer can bring their terms and conditions, fee schedule and service agreement to an AI tool and ask:
- What have I actually purchased?
- What am I entitled to receive each year?
- Which charges continue regardless of the work delivered?
- What do those charges amount to in pounds?
- What would happen if I cancelled?
- Which services could I purchase separately?
An agreement that once sat unread in a folder can become the subject of an informed conversation.
This is the purpose behind our Ask My Adviser app: help people understand documents and prepare better questions. AI output needs checking against the original material. Its usefulness is in making the relationship easier to examine.
The customer no longer has to arrive at the conversation knowing less about the deal.
Trust becomes something people can inspect
I believe this is the deeper change.
Financial services has long relied on customers trusting people whose incentives they may struggle to see. AI creates another way to interrogate those incentives.
Does the business benefit when I become more capable? Does it benefit when I remain dependent? Can I leave easily? Can I understand what I am paying for? Does the person helping me earn more if I transfer more assets?
These are questions about the structure of a relationship.
Where planning is presented as the service, but the commercial objective is to capture assets, customers deserve to see that clearly. Where a service is knowingly misrepresented or charged for without being delivered, reassuring language does not make the deception acceptable.
The Academy does not need customers to accept my conclusions in advance. We can help them inspect their own arrangements and reach their own conclusions.
My expectation is that greater understanding will move trust towards relationships whose incentives withstand scrutiny. The pace of that shift remains to be seen. Planners must still become visible, demonstrate competence and earn the relationship.
What the Academy offers instead
Our model separates planning support from the requirement to gather investments.
Academy of Life Planning provides education, professional development and a community for people developing this approach.
Academy OS provides practical tools that help people organise information, understand their situation and work through decisions.
Total Wealth Planners provide the human support layer: experienced help when a person needs it.
Get SAFE supports people after financial exploitation.
Across these activities, the principle is consistent: build the person’s capability and preserve their control.
Total wealth includes more than an investment portfolio. Health, relationships, knowledge, earning capacity, purpose and time influence the life someone can build. A good plan starts with that life and considers the money in its service.
Someone may need help with the next eighteen months. Someone else needs to understand an agreement, prepare for retirement or explore a change of work.
They should be able to purchase appropriate help without turning that problem into a lifelong asset-based arrangement.
Bring me the problem, not the portfolio.
Can a planner earn a living this way?
That remains the question from 1986—and from this week’s Practice Management Circle.
There are practitioners in our community doing paid client work. In my conversations with them, trusted relationships repeatedly matter: former clients, accountants, professional networks, events and personal introductions.
My own clients have been trusting, loyal and satisfied. But their numbers have been small. I have not demonstrated the model at scale, and I will not confuse selling professional training with proving the economics of a consumer planning practice.
AI does not remove the need to find customers. A collection of apps does not create demand by itself.
A viable practice needs a recognisable problem, a service people will buy, a credible route to those people and a price that covers the work.
That is why our next stage must connect capability with real client work: define a useful offer, test demand, understand acquisition effort, record delivery time and learn what customers value enough to purchase again.
AI can lower the cost of delivery. Trust opens the conversation. Useful outcomes give people a reason to pay.
Building before the moment demands it
The Ark story is about preparation.
If customers become more capable of examining financial arrangements, planners need to be ready to explain their value in terms those customers can understand and choose.
On 10 November, we will share the next chapter of Academy Foundations: work towards helping 10 more practitioners develop independent, agency-led practices.
We are building on an established method while addressing its commercial challenge honestly. More details will follow when the campaign opens.
For now, the invitation is to consider a simpler relationship between people, planners and money.
Financial planning without asset hoovering.
Pay for the help you need. Keep control of your wealth.
Self-directed by default. Supported when it matters.
Sources
- House of Lords, Financial Services Bill debate, 14 October 1986, volume 480, column 731.
- Cass/Bayes Business School, Underperformance rife among active mutual fund managers, 17 June 2014.
- Blake, Caulfield, Ioannidis and Tonks, New Evidence on Mutual Fund Performance, June 2014.
- S&P Dow Jones Indices, SPIVA Europe Year-End 2025.
- Vanguard, Quantifying Vanguard Adviser’s Alpha, including the qualification on the period of potential additional returns.
