The human purpose of financial planning is compelling. But does that mean the traditional financial advice business model is the only way to pursue it?
By Steve Conley, Founder, Academy of Life Planning | 9 November 2026
A remarkable statistic
According to research published by the Women’s Wealth Alliance in 2025, 93% of women who currently work, or have previously worked, in financial planning would recommend the career to other women.
That’s an impressive endorsement.
It’s also encouraging news for a profession that has struggled to attract women.
The Financial Conduct Authority’s 2025 survey of the UK advice market found that women accounted for approximately 18% of financial advisers. More than half of firms employing multiple advisers had no women working in adviser roles.
Clearly, there is room for improvement.
On 9 November, I came across a LinkedIn article from the St. James’s Place Financial Adviser Academy entitled Why do 93% of women recommend a career in financial advice to other women?
It offered five reasons:
- The work is about people, not just numbers.
- It offers flexibility alongside ambition.
- Life experience is an advantage.
- Advisers can make a meaningful difference.
- It provides opportunities for long-term professional development.
I agree with much of this.
Indeed, I have spent much of my professional life arguing that financial planning should be about people, their lives, their aspirations and their well-being.
But reading the article raised a rather different question.
Are these women recommending financial planning as a vocation, or financial intermediation as a business model?
Because those are not necessarily the same thing.
The statistic deserves closer examination
Before addressing that distinction, let’s look at the evidence.
The 93% figure comes from the Women’s Wealth Alliance’s Women in Personal Finance Survey, conducted in June 2025, with data provided by YouGov.
The research received 540 responses from women with current or previous experience across personal finance roles, including 338 financial planners.
It found that:
- 93% of respondents with experience in financial planning would recommend that career to other women.
- 88% reported considerable or reasonable flexibility in their roles.
- 82% considered that they had a good work-life balance.
- 84% identified the male-dominated nature of the sector as a barrier to women’s participation.
Those are valuable findings.
There is, however, an important methodological distinction. The survey used open links distributed through the Women’s Wealth Alliance, rather than a randomly selected representative sample of the profession.
That does not invalidate the findings. It does mean we should exercise care when generalising them.
There is another distinction.
The research measures enthusiasm for financial planning among women who have experienced the work.
It does not establish that any particular employer, academy, distribution network or remuneration model is responsible for that enthusiasm.
Nor does it tell us which business model offers the most rewarding or sustainable career.
And that brings us to the central issue.
Financial planning and financial intermediation are different activities
Traditional financial advice businesses frequently combine two activities.
The first is helping people understand their circumstances, clarify their objectives, consider their options and make informed decisions.
The second is arranging, recommending or managing financial products and assets.
These activities can complement one another.
But they do not have to be performed by the same person, or rewarded through the same commercial arrangement.
At the Academy of Life Planning, we distinguish between life-centred financial planning and financial capital management.
The former is concerned with understanding the person.
The latter is concerned with managing financial resources.
This separation matters because the skills that make someone an excellent life-centred financial planner are not necessarily the same skills required to build a successful financial intermediation business.
Someone may be exceptionally gifted at listening, understanding complex family circumstances, helping people navigate uncertainty and supporting important life decisions.
But that does not automatically mean they want to prospect for assets, distribute investment products, or build a business whose commercial success depends substantially on financial transactions and ongoing asset-related revenue.
Why should those activities be inseparable?
The commercial model matters
St. James’s Place operates a restricted financial advice model.
Its Academy provides funded professional training, qualification support and career development. Its published information explains that graduates can establish their own businesses or join existing practices within the SJP Partnership.
That is a legitimate career pathway.
And it may be an excellent choice for some people.
But prospective entrants should understand the commercial framework within which they will operate.
For example:
- Will they be employed or self-employed?
- How will they generate sufficient income?
- What responsibilities will they have for attracting clients?
- How much freedom will they have over product recommendations?
- What restrictions might apply if they subsequently leave?
- How will the value of their business and client relationships be determined?
- What happens when the interests of the client and the commercial interests of the institution diverge?
These are reasonable questions for anyone considering a professional career.
SJP provides information about several of these matters elsewhere on its website. The issue is not that the information is necessarily unavailable.
It is that the inspirational recruitment narrative does not adequately explore the distinction between the attraction of the work and the economics of the business.
A rewarding vocation does not automatically validate every business model through which that vocation can be practised.
I ran the article through BIG Checker
I decided to test the article using BIG Checker, the Academy’s AI-powered narrative analysis tool.
BIG Checker examines communications through six dimensions: Basis, Options, Gap, Emotion, Authority and Agency.
It does not determine whether a communication is truthful or whether its publisher is acting improperly.
It helps readers identify what evidence is offered, what might be missing, and what questions would improve their ability to make independent decisions.
The analysis classified the article as promotional and assigned it a medium narrative risk.
Two findings stood out.
First, the article relied heavily on the emotional attractions of financial advice: purpose, flexibility, empathy, belonging and making a difference.
Second, although it encouraged readers to consider a career, it provided relatively little comparative information about the different career pathways available.
That is an important distinction.
A person can finish reading an article feeling more enthusiastic without necessarily being better equipped to decide.
Confidence is not the same as capability.
BIG Checker suggested several questions about adviser earnings, retention, qualifications, ownership of client relationships and alternative career pathways.
I would add one more.
Do you want to become a financial planner, or do you want to become a financial intermediary?
It is entirely possible to want one without wanting the other.
Technology is changing the choices available
Historically, there were practical reasons for financial planning and financial intermediation to be bundled together.
Financial information was difficult to obtain.
Cash-flow forecasting required specialist software.
Investment research was expensive.
Comparing products, understanding pensions and interpreting complex financial documents frequently required access to professional intermediaries.
Technology has changed the economics of many of these activities.
Increasingly capable AI and digital tools can help individuals:
- Organise and understand their financial information.
- Explore alternative financial futures.
- Model retirement and lifetime cash flows.
- Examine financial documents and charging structures.
- Identify questions, inconsistencies and missing information.
- Compare options and prepare for decisions.
These capabilities do not eliminate the need for regulated advice where it is appropriate.
Nor do they mean that every individual can safely manage every financial decision independently.
But they do increase the range of activities consumers can undertake for themselves.
And they create new opportunities for professionals whose primary role is to develop the client’s capability rather than assume control of their financial affairs.
This is the distinction between institutional AI and sovereign AI.
Institutional AI helps the organisation deliver its processes. Sovereign AI helps the person develop their capabilities.
The Academy’s approach starts with the latter.
A different career proposition
Imagine someone who has spent twenty years in teaching, nursing, social care, human resources or community development.
They have accumulated considerable human capital.
They understand people.
They know how to listen.
They have experience of conflict, uncertainty, relationships, caring responsibilities, setbacks and difficult decisions.
They may have no particular interest in selling financial products or managing investment portfolios.
Nevertheless, they could become an excellent independent financial planner.
With appropriate education, professional development, ethical standards and AI-supported tools, they could help individuals and families:
- Clarify what matters most in life.
- Understand their total wealth, including human capital.
- Explore the financial implications of life decisions.
- Build practical plans for greater security and well-being.
- Develop confidence in making their own decisions.
- Recognise when specialist regulated advice is required.
- Take action and maintain progress over time.
They could charge transparently for their planning expertise.
They would not need their remuneration to depend on the placement or management of financial assets.
They could remain independent of product distribution.
This is the model we are developing through the Academy of Life Planning and our community of accredited Total Wealth Planners.
It is not simply another distribution channel.
It is a different professional proposition.
There are, of course, commercial challenges. An independent planner must attract clients, demonstrate value, maintain professional competence and generate sustainable fee income. Removing asset-based incentives does not remove the need to build a viable business.
But it does change the relationship between professional judgement and commercial reward.
Our principle is simple:
Bring me the problem, not the portfolio.
Women deserve more choices, not simply more recruitment
I welcome initiatives that encourage more women into financial services.
The profession needs greater diversity of experience, perspective and background.
But we should be careful not to assume that increasing the number of women recruited into existing institutions is the only objective.
A more ambitious objective would be to increase the number of women able to build fulfilling, financially sustainable and genuinely independent careers helping other people improve their lives.
That includes regulated financial advice.
It also includes financial coaching, education, independent life-centred planning and other forms of professional support.
Different roles require different competencies and regulatory permissions. Consumers should understand those distinctions, and practitioners must operate within the appropriate boundaries.
The point is not that one pathway must replace every other.
It is that people should be able to choose among them.
If the most attractive qualities of financial planning are empathy, flexibility, human connection, life experience and making a difference, why assume that those qualities must be monetised through financial intermediation?
Why not develop professional models that reward those qualities directly?
From recruitment to human agency
At the Academy, our mission is to restore human agency in financial planning.
That applies to the people receiving support.
But it should also apply to the professionals delivering it.
We want practitioners to have the knowledge, tools and professional confidence to choose how they work, whom they serve and how they create value.
We believe people should be self-directed by default and supported when it matters.
That principle should apply equally to clients and practitioners.
We do not need to persuade every aspiring financial professional to become an asset manager.
We need to help people recognise the different ways their skills, experience and judgement can contribute to the well-being of others.
Which returns me to that remarkable statistic.
Ninety-three per cent of women with experience in financial planning would recommend the career to other women.
Perhaps that tells us something important about the human rewards of helping people plan their lives.
But it does not tell us that the conventional financial intermediation business model is the only, or necessarily the best, way to enjoy those rewards.
The future of financial planning should not simply be about bringing more women into the existing business model.
It should be about giving more people, women and men, the freedom to choose a better model.
And in the age of AI, that choice is becoming increasingly practical.
Interested in a different approach to financial planning?
The Academy of Life Planning supports people who want to develop careers in independent, life-centred financial planning, separate from financial product distribution and asset management.
Through our GAME Plan™ framework, professional education, accreditation pathways and AI-enabled Total Wealth Plans operating system, we are building a practical alternative.
Whether you are an experienced financial adviser reconsidering your business model, or someone from another profession whose life experience could help others, we would welcome a conversation.
Self-directed by default. Supported when it matters.
Explore the Academy’s professional programmes:
Or arrange a 50-minute Strategy Zoom with me for £50 to discuss your professional ambitions.
Steve Conley
Founder, Academy of Life Planning
Sources and further reading
- St. James’s Place Financial Adviser Academy (November 2026), Why do 93% of women recommend the career to other women?.
- Women’s Wealth Alliance (2025), Women in Personal Finance Survey — Initial Results.
- Financial Conduct Authority (2026), Understanding the Advice Market: Financial Advice Firms Survey 2025.
- St. James’s Place Financial Adviser Academy, Frequently Asked Questions.
- Academy of Life Planning, The BIG Checker — Analysis Report, 9 November 2026.
