Financial Planner Life Podcast

A paraplanner sits down on a Monday morning to write one new business suitability report and loses most of the day to it. The document runs to 40+ pages. The client takes it home after a one hour meeting and, if we are honest, reads about five of them.
Sam Oakes is joined by Jack Sleator, co-founder of Templi and a former paraplanner and adviser who spent five years inside UK advice firms before he started building software for them. Jack went from a graduate admin scheme at a large Irish wealth manager, into paraplanning at a national firm in Newcastle, then into advice at an IFA, before co-founding Templi in 2024.
Templi started life as a suitability report writing tool and relaunched as a connector that sits across the systems advice firms already use, automating the work in between client meetings. That shift is the heart of this conversation. Writing the report faster is the easy win. What happens to the paraplanner career path, to accountability, and to the 40 page document itself is the much harder question, and Jack does not dodge any of it.
In a survey of 209 advisers, suitability report writing came out as the single biggest bottleneck in the advice workflow, taking around three hours on average. Jack has customers who have cut that to 20 minutes. He is also the first to say that a time saving in one place does not change what an advice business is capable of.
This episode is built for paraplanners, financial advisers and firm owners who want a straight answer on what AI actually changes inside a regulated advice business, rather than another round of provider marketing.
EPISODE TAKEAWAYS:
• Why Jack thinks the paraplanner role survives, and which tasks he expects to disappear first
• The uncomfortable gap behind a 74% AI adoption rate and a 6.2 out of 10 efficiency score
• The reason your data does not need to be perfect before you start, only reachable
• What happens to the junior career ladder when AI handles the letters of authority
• The one question to ask an AI output before you put your name on it
• Whether the 40 page suitability report deserves to survive at all
• Where to start on Monday morning if your firm has not touched AI yet
Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance
Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.
✅ Trusted by top UK firms
👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 
Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to ceri@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.

Almost nobody in financial services can explain what an employee benefits consultant actually does all day, which is strange for a specialism that sits inside most of the big advice firms in the UK.
Sam Oakes is joined by Natalie Malone, who leads the Risk and Reward team within Titan Wealth's corporate division. Natalie has spent almost 17 years in this part of the profession, starting in junior support roles and working her way up to running a specialist team of healthcare and group risk consultants.
Her clients are businesses rather than individuals, so the people she advises are HR directors, finance directors and, in smaller firms, the CEO. The job is to build a wellbeing strategy that keeps staff healthy, engaged and at work, then justify every pound of it with data the business can see for itself.
Rising private medical premiums, group income protection, salary exchange, early intervention on long term absence, menopause awareness, neurodiversity support: all of it sits alongside corporate pensions and individual advice, and all of it is regularly bought, filed and forgotten by the businesses paying for it.

Key takeaways:
●Why an employer's greatest asset is the exact thing most benefits packages fail to protect properly
●The difference between risk and reward, and why confusing them costs businesses money
●How claims data turns a nervous employer into a convinced one
●What early intervention really means, and why the target is the people who are struggling but not yet signed off
●Why Natalie will not call herself a broker
● What she looks for when hiring, and the one thing she says cannot be taught
Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance
Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.
✅ Trusted by top UK firms
👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 
Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to ceri@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.

Financial planners are sitting on a confidence problem: a 70% opportunity gap when it comes to closing, and it is costing them business they should be winning.
Chris Larkin, founder of training consultancy BigRock, returns to the podcast alongside Mark Rockliffe, CEO of Pembroke Financial Planning, to unpack what is really behind that number and what Pembroke has done differently over the past 12 months, growing from around 80 to 170 people along the way.
BigRock's Advisor Advantage diagnostic tool, completed by hundreds of Financial Planner Life listeners, found this audience scoring 48% higher than the industry average on protecting time before and after client meetings, one of several results Chris and Mark break down in this episode.
For financial planners, advisers and business owners in financial services who want to close more consultatively, not more aggressively.

Key takeaways:
●Why "are you happy to go ahead?" is the only closing line advisers need
● The acronym BigRock uses to turn a client's own words into the reason they act
●What a 137% gap in structured objection handling is really telling the industry
●Why only 9% of UK adults take financial planning advice
●How Pembroke grew from 80 to 170 people without changing what “selling” means to its advisers
Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance
Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.
✅ Trusted by top UK firms
👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 
Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to ceri@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.

Jeanne Mpondo asked a room full of women in London whether anybody there was investing in anything. Not one hand went up. She then asked who owned their home or held a pension, and hands went up all over the room.
Jeanne Mpondo is a St. James's Place partner running her own practice in London, and a former senior data analyst at S&P Global. She came into financial planning by accident, after helping her uncle raise the funding for long term care.
She talks to Sam Oakes about coming through the St. James's Place Academy with three children at home, choosing to build her own practice from nothing rather than inherit a client bank, and specialising in women who are independent business owners and senior executives in the city. Running underneath it all is a language problem: the profession keeps describing money in words that do not match how a lot of clients experience their own.
Around 56% of the world's wealth is expected to be in the hands of women from 2027. Jeanne is candid about what she has learned about actually reaching that client, from the 37 to 45 age window she works in to the reason her clients book that first meeting on their own.
Key Takeaways:
• The question that emptied a room of raised hands, and what it revealed about how clients hear the word investing
• Why her female clients come to the first meeting alone, and what changes when the spouse finally joins
• The asset most women overlook in a divorce until the negotiation has already moved past it
• What a career break quietly costs a pension by 60, and the window to make it back
• Why she tells anyone eyeing the partner route to bank two to three years of resources first
• The half of the qualification nobody warns you about, and it is not the exams
Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance
Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.
✅ Trusted by top UK firms
👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 
Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to ceri@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.

Towards the end of her ten years in law, Imogen worked out that fifteen hour days for three and a half months would get her to the billable hours she needed for her bonus. She did it, hit the number, and then handed in her notice. 

Sam Oakes speaks to Imogen Winfield, Paraplanner and soon to be qualified financial planner at City Gate Financial Planning, about the five month career break that became a complete change of profession. 

Imogen spent a decade at a US law firm, qualifying into litigation and working on commercial disputes and investigations with a financial services focus. Her clients were institutional investors, hedge funds and ultra high net worth individuals. What she did not have was control over her own time, and partnership, the destination everyone else was working towards, was the part that appealed least. 

She took an 84% pay cut to join City Gate, the largest pay cut that Sam has come across from anyone entering the profession. She started as operations manager, moved into paraplanning within four months, and is now close to being signed off as a competent adviser. 

Key takeaways: 
• Why partnership does not mean taking your foot off the gas, from someone who watched it up close 
• The billable hours maths that produced fifteen hour days for three and a half months 
• The single question that made financial planning click, and it had nothing to do with returns 
• Why lawyers on six figures need advice years before they think they do 
• What an operations role teaches a career changer that an admin role never will 
• The cashflow assumption almost every adviser gets wrong about high earning lawyers 
 
Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance
Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.
✅ Trusted by top UK firms
👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 
Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to ceri@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.