There are around 31,000 advisers currently authorised by the FCA to give advice. Of these only around 6% are under 30 and 84% of all advisers are male. There are 209,000 solicitors, 7,000 young ones enter the profession each year and 52% of all solicitors are now female. The reasons are reasonably obvious; there hasn’t been and still isn’t a clear way into doing what we do, and many, especially those who could or should choose it as a career, aren’t clear about what it is that we do actually do. So I guess there’s a need to educate before we can start to educate, to get the message out that our work is and should be valued. If we’re doing our job properly we’re there for the long term, not just when someone dies or you want to move house or sue your neighbours. And maybe that’s the difference. I’m sure we’ve met many a doctor, solicitor and accountant with no bedside manner or ability to explain complicated stuff in anything approaching layman’s language As having a financial adviser is still largely voluntary, you can’t get far without some pretty well-developed ‘soft skills’; which take time, for many, to develop and which I’d say, without wishing to gender-stereotype, come more naturally to the female of the species.
“FCA: ‘We’re not against small firms’”
We’ve always been a small firm, even when we thought we were big, as the official classification is ‘ten advisers or less’. There is a, perhaps justifiable perception that our regulator would prefer to regulate far fewer big firms, rather than the many thousands of smaller adviser companies which are still in the vast majority, with over 88% of the 4,600 odd directly-authorised financial advisers comprising less than 5 advisers.
