By Steve Nelson and Rich Mayor
State of the Advice Nation, wave seven, has officially landed.
This year’s report is titled ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, and it continues to be a real labour of love for us as an organisation. We did the first SOTAN six years ago, and it’s grown arms and legs since then.
A total of 501 respondents took part in this year’s study[1], and we’re so grateful to all those who generously give up their time this year and every year to get involved.
Those members of the profession are drawn from across the sector: advisers, planners, business owners, paraplanners, operations, compliance and more. What’s resulted is over 80,000 (!) data points and our biggest report yet.
We hope you get some usuable insight from it. As always, there’s so much in the report that it would be impossible to set it all out here, but here’s a taster of some of the findings we think are interesting:
Paraplanning as a career
Which of the following best describes what your future career path might look like?
Last year we introduced a SOTAN section dedicated to paraplanners only, and we’ve brought this back for this latest wave.
We were keen to understand respondents’ feelings around things like career aspirations, and one question we asked paraplanners this time round was where they see themselves in their careers over the next few years.
We were surprised and, actually, heartened to see there’s a 2:1 ratio of people who say their future lies with paraplanning and developing their career as a paraplanner, rather than a potential move into planning and advice.
Perhaps less surprising is what paraplanners view as the biggest inhibitors to their day-to-day working lives. Provider administration continues to rank as the biggest barrier to getting the paraplanning job done, but there’s also been a notable shift in the proportion of those who put technology as their biggest obstacle (more on this theme later).
Those new to advice
Have any of the following been a pleasant or unpleasant surprise about the profession and wider sector?
One of the aims of SOTAN is to give a voice to different cohorts of the advice profession. For the first time, we have a section dedicated to new recruits – those who have less than five years’ experience within the advice sector.
When we asked respondents what surprised them on entering the profession, the good news is the level of support they have received from both colleagues and the wider industry were all cited as pleasant surprises. Unpleasant surprises chime with what their more established peers say – regulation, bureaucracy and the amount of paperwork that still governs the sector.
Most new joiners we heard from would see themselves remaining in advice roles in the future. Yet it’s worth noting that just over one in five think they’ll be doing something different, either a different role or something outside of financial services altogether. For all the talk about attracting new talent, this suggests more work is needed to keep and develop those starting out in advice.
AI in advice
Adopting AI into the workplace
Attitudes towards AI in advice have changed markedly over the past 12 months, and that has been met by a lot of activity.
Nearly a third of respondents are using AI in some form – almost double the number from wave six – and there’s still further appetite among firms who say they’ll be using AI within the next year. Five years is the furthest people say they will look to incorporate AI into their business, with hardly anyone looking beyond this timeframe.
This partly reflects how far ahead people tend to think in general, but also that the market is a fast-changing one. It’s also a market that may look very different in the next year or so, let alone beyond that.
For those already using AI, most usage is geared around note-taking and minutes for meetings. Others use it for creating and editing reports and making them more client-friendly, as well as for research and marketing.
So those are some SOTAN highlights from us – plenty more insight where that came from though.
If you subscribe to our stuff or if you took part in the survey, you’ll have received your full copy of SOTAN already.
If you’re part of a larger organisation that works with the advice profession, get in touch with the insight team for how to get hold of a copy, and how we can best support your business.
And if you’re a member of the advice profession and want to participate in research like SOTAN in future, the way to do that is to join our over 1,600-strong lang cat panel.
[1] Let the record state Stave was denied a darts theme for this report. Silenced!
