Financial advice needs to evolve to better cater to younger people as they accumulate their own wealth, Ben Chapman Wealth Management financial planner, Chloe Dillon-Smith, has cautioned.
Dillon-Smith, an adviser who worked at a travel agency before joining the St James’s Place academy, spoke to FT Adviser about the advice gap .
“Regardless of how much the industry is changing, I do still think there's a very hard lean into a specific type of person, the kind of person who you would think a financial adviser looks like,” she explained.
However, she cautioned this will need to change in the future as younger generations start their working lives and as the great wealth transfer takes place.
“I think there's a massive gap there in terms of younger people coming on board and how we would advise them,” she said. “I do think the industry needs to kind of evolve. It needs to actively seek out those people and try to be somebody that they want to speak to.”
She said the industry could expand its reach by striking a balance between new technological developments and traditional advice methods.
Dillon-Smith said: “At the moment, we've got a lot in the industry about robo-advice and people getting a lot of information online, whether it's chat GPT or whatever it might be. I think it is really important to acknowledge that the more technological assisted advice is out there in the industry and that it has its place.
“However, what I say to quite a lot of people that I meet is don’t just do it because it's told to you or someone else is doing it, and it's working really well. It’s very important that you mould it around your specific situation.”
Dillon-Smith therefore thought it is important for the industry to have middle ground.
Industry perception
Dillon-Smith said before joining the industry her perception of it and how it affected her in the early days of her career, particularly around her clothing.
“I think I had a preconception about what I needed to wear and what I would need to look like when I am in the city,” she said.
“I'd say it took me about six months to decide, ‘I'm just gonna wear whatever I want to wear and see clients that would want that’.”
Dillon-Smith said she came to the realisation there isn't actually a perception of what female advisers should be. She recounted attending an event which championed a different look.
“It encouraged wearing pink as a symbolic pushback of historic uniform rules, such as women not being allowed to wear trousers for the first sort of 10 years of being allowed in Lloyds,” she said.
“We were championing that pink theme and there were around 80 women who came to Lombard Street all wearing pink. It was like taking back the ownership of the idea that we have to fit a particular kind of mould.”
