“‘Trust in the industry needs to be built'”

Oct 11, 2022 | Financial Services

“Trust needs to be built in the financial advice industry, and bringing in people from different backgrounds is the way to go about it”. All very well, but the aim of our regulator has been to change financial advising from an ‘industry’ to a profession, and so encourage full-term career advisers to choose to train at 20-something, as do most accountants and solicitors. Thirty years ago, it was a second career, and virtually all of those now-50-something advisers have been engineers or soldiers, builders or miners, to name but a few. Back then the entry-level training was two weeks in the classroom, two weeks on the road, and off you went as a self-employed life insurance salesman. Not many made it past the first couple of months but most who did are still advising. And not many these days, can or will take a couple of years’ worth of exams to head into an uncertain future. Can’t have it both ways, guys.

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“Simon Evan-Cook: FCA must wake up to consolidation damage”

“Simon Evan-Cook: FCA must wake up to consolidation damage”

This is where I can don my ‘been around the block, seen it all before’ mantle. What’s happening in our business/industry/profession at the moment is a lot of what’s become known as consolidation, big companies, many fuelled by private equity, buying up smaller firms or taking over the clients of retiring advisers.