Financial Planner Life Podcast

Find out more about Aberdeen Adviser: https://fpl.partners/aberdeen-adviser
Connect with Derek Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-smith-b687721/
Why does the financial advice process still take seven systems and seven hours? Derek Smith, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Aberdeen Adviser, joins Sam Oakes on Financial Planner Life to explain what is broken for UK financial advisers and financial planners, who is to blame, and how AI could fix it.

A financial adviser finishes a client meeting and then starts typing. The same details go into seven different systems, and roughly seven hours disappear into keying a single advice process before any advice is written.

Derek has spent 27 years in product and technology, across investment banking, trading, start-ups and a fashion tech company. He says the software financial advice firms use is about 20 years behind the apps on your phone. He calls the problem the three sevens: seven pieces of software, seven hours of keying, client data rekeyed up to seven times. Aberdeen Adviser supports around 2,500 financial advice firms and £80 billion of assets, takes roughly 350,000 calls a year, and believes 70% of those calls exist only because of friction in the advice process.

QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS EPISODE

Who is to blame for the broken financial advice process?
Derek says it is shared. The advice firm owns the end-to-end journey for its client. Platforms and advice tech providers own their part of it, and have been too slow to work together across it.

How much does it cost a financial planning firm to serve one client?
On average £1,500 to £2,500 a year across the firm's whole cost base. That is why many financial planners will not take on a client with less than £250,000, and why 30 to 40% of a typical financial planning book is unprofitable at any one time.

Why are financial advisers serving fewer clients?
Five years ago the average UK financial adviser served 120 to 125 clients. Today it is around 100, and the advice gap is widening.

Can AI reduce the cost of financial advice?
Derek believes a financial advice firm built from scratch today, on connected data and AI, could serve a client for under £500 a year, within 12 to 18 months.

What should financial planners do in the next six months?
Test conversational AI tools that work across your data now, and redesign your advice and service processes end to end rather than chasing 1% improvements.

ALSO IN THIS EPISODE
• How Aberdeen Adviser is handing back a million minutes of adviser time
• CRM integrations with Intelliflo and ZeroKey that end rekeying
• The data quality problem that makes AI risky in a regulated advice firm
• How Derek would build a financial advice firm from day one
• Why a one-person financial advice firm could be 18 to 24 months away

This episode is for financial advisers, financial planners, paraplanners and advice firm owners weighing up their tech stack, how far down the asset scale they can afford to serve, or whether to start building with AI now.

Find out more about Aberdeen Adviser: https://fpl.partners/aberdeen-adviser
Connect with Derek Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-smith-b687721/
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 sam@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.

Learn more about The Openwork Partnership 
How do you move from employed administrator and paraplanner to self-employed financial adviser, business owner and appointed representative of The Openwork Partnership?

In this Financial Planner Life podcast, Sam Oakes speaks with Rose Hawkins, founder of Pebble Rose Wealth, about financial adviser training, self-employment and building a financial planning business within The Openwork Partnership network.

Rose joined the first Openwork Partnership Route to Principal cohort intending to buy the practice she had worked in since she was 18. A succession plan was being discussed, funding was available and an established client bank was waiting.

Seven modules later, Rose changed direction and launched her own company.

In her first 12 months as a self-employed financial adviser, Rose generated £4 million of assets under management through accountant introductions, Openwork mortgage adviser referrals and recommendations from existing clients.

Rose explains why she became an appointed representative of The Openwork Partnership rather than establishing a directly authorised financial advice firm. For employed advisers, paraplanners and IFAs comparing a financial adviser network with going directly authorised, this is an honest account of the support, opportunities and responsibilities involved.

OPENWORK PARTNERSHIP SUPPORT

Rose discusses:

• Openwork Business School and CII exam training
• Route to Principal and Partnering for Growth
• Partnership Development Managers
• Supervisory, quality and regulatory support
• Adviser introductions and network referrals
• Mortgage, protection and wealth opportunities
• Marketing, technology and acquisition funding

Rose began at 18 through an apprenticeship, working four days in administration and studying for one. Administration became paraplanning. Paraplanning became responsibility for a client bank. She then gained her Openwork wealth licence, achieved competent adviser status and became self-employed.

The episode explores how administration and paraplanning build technical knowledge, confidence and client experience. Rose also shares the reality of running a one-person practice while finding clients, marketing the business and working towards Chartered Financial Planner status.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Employed to self-employed financial adviser
Appointed representative network versus directly authorised IFA
How Openwork Route to Principal changed Rose’s succession plan
Building Pebble Rose Wealth instead of buying a practice
Generating £4 million of AUM in 12 months
Support available through The Openwork Partnership
Administration and paraplanning routes into financial advice
CII gap fill, Chartered status and mortgage licensing
Partnering for Growth and Rose’s expansion plans
Walking away from buying an Openwork practice
Starting a financial planning apprenticeship at 18
Thirteen years in an Openwork advice firm
 Administrator and paraplanner to financial adviser
CII Level 4, AF exams and Chartered status
Rose’s career within The Openwork Partnership
Openwork Business School training
Credibility as a young female adviser
Women in financial planning careers
Openwork wealth licence and competent adviser status
Employed to self-employed financial adviser
Openwork Route to Principal
The module that changed her business plan
Starting a financial planning business
Openwork support for an appointed representative
Running a one-person financial planning practice
Generating £4 million of AUM in year one
Mindset for self-employed advisers
Adding an Openwork mortgage adviser licence
Family financial planning and generational wealth
Openwork Partnering for Growth

ABOUT THE OPENWORK PARTNERSHIP

The Openwork Partnership is one of the UK’s largest and most established financial advice networks, with almost 5,000 financial advisers across more than 800 firms and a history spanning over 50 years.

It supports appointed representative firms and self-employed financial advisers with authorisation, oversight, training, technology and business development across wealth, mortgage and protection advice.

The Openwork Partnership is a trading style of Openwork Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Join The Openwork Partnership: 👉 https://bit.ly/Openworkjobs

ABOUT FINANCIAL PLANNER LIFE

Financial Planner Life shares UK financial adviser careers, IFA business stories, paraplanning, financial planner training, self-employment and appointed representative opportunities.

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 sam@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.

Learn more about the St. James's Place Academy
When a financial adviser retires, their clients do not retire with them. Somebody has to be ready to pick up those relationships, and the profession is not currently producing enough people to do it.
Sam Oakes welcomes back Gee Foottit, who leads the St James’s Place Academy, the longest running adviser training programme in the profession, to talk through what has changed for 2026.
Almost 50% of financial advisers in the UK are over 50, and fewer than 30% are under 40. The Academy was built as a succession plan, and it has ended up shaping the whole market. Of everyone appointed as a new financial adviser last year, over half came through this one programme.
Gee and Sam Oakes walk the route in order: the six CII exams, the three terms, the selection process, and the two ways out of the Academy into either your own practice or an existing one.
The Academy makes over 500 changes to the programme in an average year. Term two has already been cut from three months to nine weeks on the back of delegate feedback, so new advisers reach clients sooner and take a shallower dip in earnings on the way.
Essential listening for anybody weighing up a move into financial advice, and for practice owners thinking about succession and recruitment. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS
Why over half of last year’s new advisers came out of a single academy
The real answer on financial support during training, including the £2,000 a month figure
How a first time pass rate of around 90% is achieved in a profession averaging 55% to 60%
The contract question new advisers forget to ask
What is new for 2026: a dedicated business owners programme and five areas of coaching
Why capital value changes the maths on taking a pay cut to retrain
The Outgrow Your Career campaign, and the 18% problem behind it
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 sam@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.

An adviser told Brian McLaughlin he was about to disengage 300 clients because he simply could not service them anymore. He did not want to. He just could not see another option.
Brian McLaughlin is the founder of Pillar Client Services, and he has spent 27 years in financial services, from Prudential through to Rathbones and Octopus. Two and a half years of MBA research took him inside around 250 IFA firms, and what he found was a time problem dressed up as a client problem.
Firms know they carry a tail of clients who cost more to look after than they bring in. Very few can put a number on it at client level. Pillar Lens plugs into the back office system and does exactly that, showing what each individual client costs to serve. Pillar Client Services then runs the reviews on those clients under the firm's own brand, so the client sees continuity while the adviser gets the time back.
The headline from the research, drawn from roughly 150 firms: between 44% and 72% of the average advice book costs more to serve than it generates.
This one is for financial planners, IFA principals, practice managers, and anyone buying or selling an advice book.

In this episode:
The stat that stops most principals in their tracks, and why recency bias hides it
Why "my best clients" is a feeling, and what the data says instead
How 100 clients end up carrying 70 to 80% of a firm's revenue
The three options every firm has with a subthreshold book, and why two of them hurt
What clients actually notice when reviews move to a white label team
How 340 hours goes back into a business, and what firms do with it
Why a clean review trail protects the firm as much as the client
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 sam@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.

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 sam@financialplannerlife.com
Reach out to sam@financialplannerlife.com in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.