Why financial advice has an AI problem (and what actually fixes it)

We ask each guest to bring along a chart they think every advisor and their client should be looking at right now.

Tell us a little bit about the chart that recently blew you away.

And if you're interested in seeing that chart, you should sign up to the Basis Points newsletter.

We send that out every single Wednesday morning.

You get a write-up of the interview and the chart so you can share it with your team and your clients.

Over to you, Simon.

What's your chart?

Yeah, so the chart that I shared shows revenue numbers in the financial advice industry and it shows adoption rates of AI.

The reason why I particularly like this chart is that there has been zero correlation between the uptick in AI adoption and growth numbers in the financial advice industry.

It is very clear that what has been implemented today is extremely superficial.

It's not really solving real problems.

It hasn't reduced or removed the capacity constraint.

My thesis is that the industry doesn't yet get what is possible with the technology and needs to realise that we've still got a bit of time to go before we can start really adopting it in meaningful ways.

But you don't want people sitting on their hands and getting left behind.

No, absolutely not.

I totally agree.

You have to use the tooling.

But I think the current set of tooling that's been marketed as...

AI for financial advisors has been limiting.

And there's about 40 of these businesses that are all doing a very similar thing, most of which haven't been run by people that have worked in financial advice, some of which have, hats off to them, that actually understand the pain that we go through.

But the technology has not superseded the marketing and the chess beating of the industry to date.

We ask each guest to bring along a chart they think every advisor and their client should be looking at right now.

Tell us a little bit about the chart that recently blew you away.

And if you're interested in seeing that chart, you should sign up to the Basis Points newsletter.

We send that out every single Wednesday morning.

You get a write-up of the interview and the chart so you can share it with your team and your clients.

Over to you, Simon.

What's your chart?

Yeah, so the chart that I shared shows revenue numbers in the financial advice industry and it shows adoption rates of AI.

The reason why I particularly like this chart is that there has been zero correlation between the uptick in AI adoption and growth numbers in the financial advice industry.

It is very clear that what has been implemented today is extremely superficial.

It's not really solving real problems.

It hasn't reduced or removed the capacity constraint.

My thesis is that the industry doesn't yet get what is possible with the technology and needs to realise that we've still got a bit of time to go before we can start really adopting it in meaningful ways.

But you don't want people sitting on their hands and getting left behind.

No, absolutely not.

I totally agree.

You have to use the tooling.

But I think the current set of tooling that's been marketed as...

AI for financial advisors has been limiting.

And there's about 40 of these businesses that are all doing a very similar thing, most of which haven't been run by people that have worked in financial advice, some of which have, hats off to them, that actually understand the pain that we go through.

But the technology has not superseded the marketing and the chess beating of the industry to date.