What will clients pay you for in 2030?
Are you good at financial planning? Do you love doing it? Does the world need it? Will people pay you for it directly?
If you want to be in business in 2030, that last question deserves your attention now.
Perhaps your clients are wealthy delegators. They’re busy, they trust you, and they’re happy to pay someone to look after their money. The ongoing investment fee also pays for the planning you do along the way. As long as clients want both services, the arrangement makes sense.
Picture your next review meeting.
Your client has used AI to read your suitability report and terms of business, work out what they pay in pounds and compare the cost with a direct-to-consumer platform. They’ve run a first pass at their retirement cash flow. They arrive with a question.
“If I looked after the investments myself, what would I still pay you to help me with?”
Think about the conversations where you’ve made the biggest difference. Perhaps you helped someone see they could afford to work three days a week. Or helped a couple decide how much they could give their children while keeping enough for later life. Or helped a business owner think through what they wanted life to look like after a sale, then work out what to ask their accountant and solicitor.
That’s where I think many planners add their greatest value. You help people understand what’s possible, make a decision and act on it. Some decisions call for specialist advice. Your judgement helps the client ask the right questions and see how the answers fit together.
Why now?
A client can do more of the groundwork before they sit down with you. That changes what they need from the meeting and gives them a clearer basis for asking what the ongoing fee buys. If your best work is buried in an investment fee, how will clients know they can come to you for that work in its own right?
There’s a conversation you can have now. Ask a few clients what they’d still come to you for if they moved their portfolio tomorrow. Listen to the words they use. Their answers can help you understand what they value, choose what to offer, and test whether they’ll pay for it directly.
Why me?
I was Head of Investments at HSBC UK before founding the Academy of Life Planning in April 2012. I’ve been a financial planner working from a life-planning approach ever since. For the first seven years, I combined financial planning with wealth management intermediation as an IFA. From 2012 to 2014, I ran the regulated side myself as an appointed representative of Sense Network. From 2014 to 2019, I carried out the regulated work as a registered individual with a directly authorised firm.
In the early years, most of my referrals came from a discretionary manager whose wealthy clients needed independent financial planning. They already had someone managing their investments. They came to me for a plan.
Over time, I worked with more and more people that other IFAs wouldn’t see. Business owners, members of occupational pension schemes, property entrepreneurs, families with lives across borders and people who managed their own investments. The problems they brought me rarely began with a portfolio.
Eventually, a consolidator questioned my competence in wealth management intermediation because I was doing so little of it. By then, I was getting more experienced in the work clients sought me out for while doing less of the work the consolidator was assessing. In 2019, I stopped intermediating on financial products and carried on planning.
That experience shapes what we offer at the Academy today. We train planners to start with the person and build a plan around the life they want to live. We build tools that help clients do more of the groundwork themselves. And in the Private Members’ Club, we work through the commercial questions together, including how to define, price and deliver planning as a service in its own right.
If a client took their portfolio elsewhere tomorrow, what would they still come to you for?
Make financial planning your main business
I made the switch in 2019. Through the Academy’s Foundation Offers, we’re helping 10 more financial advisers move from wealth management intermediation to a practice built around financial planning.
If you’d like clients to pay you directly for the planning work you love, we’ll help you work out what to offer, what to charge and how to make the transition.
