Adviser 3.0: The Podcast

The FCA has asked the world's biggest AI companies to behave themselves. Politely.Rebecca Aldridge, Managing Director and founder of Balance: Wealth Planning, joins Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher on the SoapBox, and the debate gets lively.A major provider wants to hand advisers slick, white label advice tech for their smaller clients. Brilliant innovation, or a way for advisers to eat their own lunch? And when the tech gets it wrong, whose name is on the advice?The regulator's answer to AI giving out financial advice is a request for disclaimers, not a rule. Matt wants proper rules. Abraham takes the side of the AI firms. Rebecca asks why the advice profession feels it has to care at all.New research suggests plenty of people are happy to invest on their own. So where should the line be before you bring in an adviser? Rebecca argues it's about complexity, not the size of the pot, and that the basics of protection are being forgotten in the rush to gather assets.Then, send in the clones. Abraham asks Rebecca whether she'd let him build "Becky AI", and the panel argues over how close a copy could ever get to the real thing.Plus, another tax on the banks. Easy target, or just politics?

Who Pays? Part 2 of 2Britain’s billionaires are packing their bags. Should we feel sorry for them?In the second half of this bumper SoapBox, Matt Pitcher and Abraham Okusanya are back with Clémence Chatelin, Chartered Financial Planner at Ovation Finance, and the gloves come off.First up is the London Stock Exchange. Companies are being bought up and taken private, almost nobody is listing, and the UK’s slice of global markets keeps shrinking. Abraham thinks that’s bad news for entrepreneurs, investors and the country. Clem explains how we got here, and what UK pensions could do about it.Then the big one. Abraham argues that losing the wealthiest taxpayers leaves the rest of us with a bigger bill. Matt would rather go after the tax they avoid on the way out. And Clem has a different kind of sympathy: they never get to feel they have enough.Finally, with the Budget almost here, the panel makes its predictions on capital gains tax, the banks, the triple lock and whether any of it will fix the big problems.Missed Part 1? Go back for Gen Z, ESG and the return of Help to Buy.

Who Pays? Part 1 of 2What if the worst-case scenario in your cash flow model isn’t bad enough anymore?In the first half of a bumper SoapBox, Matt Pitcher and Abraham Okusanya are joined by Clémence Chatelin, Chartered Financial Planner at Ovation Finance, and the sparks fly early.Clem asks how you plan a retirement in a world of floods, wildfires and homes that can no longer be insured. Abraham isn’t buying the idea that the future will be worse than the past, and he brings the data to make his case.Then the generational fault line opens up. Why are younger investors turning to crypto and prediction markets instead of pensions and ISAs? And did ESG ever deserve its moment, or did the industry oversell it?Finally, the government wants first-time buyers on the ladder with just a 2.5% deposit. Clem has lived through Help to Buy and has a warning for anyone tempted by its comeback. Abraham, a proud homeowner, isn’t so sure.Part 2, on vanishing billionaires, a shrinking London Stock Exchange and the Budget, follows on Friday.

“My business is my pension.” Reme Holland hears it all the time from business owners, and he always gives the same answer: it really isn’t.Reme runs financial planning inside Albert Goodman, one of the South West’s biggest accountancy firms. That gives him a front-row seat to what happens when planners and accountants share a building, and a client.He tells Abraham Okusanya how he went from knocking on doors on commission only to running a planning business, why planners rank somewhere down with traffic wardens on trust, and how a simple referral from the accountant can quietly turn planning into a one-off transaction.Then it gets candid. Reme took over a business with too many support staff, too few advisers and timesheets nobody took seriously. He rebuilt it, and explains why he’d tell any firm to stop forcing every client into a percentage fee.Plus: private equity is buying up accountancy firms across the country. So why is Albert Goodman saying no, and what happens to the dream of making partner if everyone else says yes?Reme Holland: https://albertgoodman.co.uk/our-people/reme-hollandAlbert Goodman Financial Planning: https://albertgoodman.co.uk/financial-planning

Philippa Hann spent the best part of 20 years as a litigator in financial services, working on the scandals that kept on coming. Underneath every one sat the same question: why do good people do bad things? Her new book, The Fault Lines of Finance, co-written with neuropsychologist Dr Moira Somers, is her answer, and she joins Abraham Okusanya to unpack it.Philippa's argument is that misconduct is rarely a bad person problem. It's a good person problem. Most of us don't like feeling uncomfortable, and when our behaviour clashes with how we see ourselves, our brains find a story to make it okay. She explains how cognitive dissonance, rationalisation and the slippery slope of small decisions can lead capable, well-meaning professionals somewhere they never meant to go, and why working so close to money makes the risk sharper in finance than in most professions.The conversation turns to where ethics training falls short. Spotting a dilemma and knowing what to do are the easy parts. The hard parts are moral motivation, putting your standards ahead of your mortgage or your place in the team, and moral character, holding your ground when someone tells you that's not how things are done around here. Abraham tests the ideas against a grey-area expenses dilemma from his own diary, and Philippa answers it with the question that sits at the heart of the book.For leaders, Philippa sets out integrity by design: the two questions every team is silently asking, what does good look like around here and can I trust what you say, and why a travel policy can tell you more about a firm's culture than its values statement. She argues that the quality of relationships inside a business is what makes difficult conversations possible. She also shares the personal toolkit from the book: knowing your vulnerabilities, writing down your non-negotiables, and keeping a few back-pocket phrases ready for the moment your stomach lurches.She closes with a challenge to the whole profession. The purpose of business isn't to make money, she argues, it's to serve society, and that should shape how every financial professional decides what good enough looks like.An essential listen for anyone leading a firm, managing people, or just starting out in advice.

Lisa Conway-Hughes never expected to end up in financial advice. She always felt it wasn't an industry for people like her, so when she founded LCH Wealth she set out to build the firm she would actually have wanted as a client.In this episode, host Kate Phillips traces Lisa's route from a commission-only role cold-booking appointments, with no safety net to fall back on, to becoming a directly authorised Chartered Financial Adviser running her own growing practice. Lisa is candid about the leap: why she refused to burn bridges on the way out, how she kept the clients who mattered through honest conversations rather than a dash for the door, and the principle she carried with her, doing the right thing even when it's hard.She also tells the story behind Miss Lolly, the money brand she has built on Instagram, and it was anything but an overnight success. She went years without a single client from it, and the most common thing new clients say now is that they followed her for years before ever getting in touch. Lisa explains why she almost never sells on social, how commenting on the news became a compliance-friendly way to create content, and why she would rather teach people to think for themselves about money than tell them what to do.The conversation gets practical too: how she segments clients and takes people on from scratch, why she hires for people skills over financial knowledge, the strict money routines that keep both her business and her personal finances on an even keel, and the worry that a whole generation of investors has never lived through a real market crash. And she shares the holiday read that finally convinced her to stop waiting and back herself.A warm, honest listen for any adviser weighing up whether they could build something of their own.

SoapBox is the undiluted edition of Adviser 3.0, where Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher give their unfiltered take on the news moving UK financial advice. This week they're joined by Emma Bird, Financial Planning Director at Hansford Bell, for a wide-ranging and often provocative conversation.They open on the news that a long-trusted technical and tax resource is being pulled in-house, what that leaves for the independent advisers who relied on it, and why the veteran who built it is striking out on his own all over again. From there the talk turns to accountability at the top of the profession: a high-profile regulatory ban upheld on appeal, and what it says about governance, culture, and whether the industry feels like a safe place to build a career.Emma then makes the case that the so-called adviser shortage is a story the profession tells itself. Firms complain there's no new blood coming through, she argues, while only ever hiring the already-qualified, applying entry requirements the current generation never had to meet, and overlooking the talent already sitting in their own offices and in the banks. Her own route from a standing start to director and part-owner is the counter-example.Finally, in Matt's AI Corner, the panel digs into the news that a leading AI lab has begun plugging straight into US adviser tech, why UK data-protection rules keep that same firepower away from client data on this side of the Atlantic, and where tools like Timeline's own Penny fit for firms that want the upside without handing their data away.Listen, subscribe, and let us know which side you land on.Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0x7rCJ8VE9of5WkVLxCTkgApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/adviser-3-0-the-podcast/id1547403924YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Adviser3.0

A portfolio built from the biggest, best companies in the world, held right through one of the great bull markets, and it still lost to inflation. How does that happen, and who is it happening to?That is where this episode of SoapBox begins. Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher are joined by Julian Gilbert, Founder and Director of Wealth Matters, for a blunt hour on where financial advice earns its keep and where it quietly fails people.They open on the great companies beaten by inflation: a prospect's ten-year review showing an expensive, actively managed, almost entirely equity proposition that trailed inflation for the best part of a decade, and what that says about a profession still being paid to underdeliver. Then the pensioner tax raid. Fiscal drag is pulling more retirees into higher-rate tax every year, the triple lock has become the most toxic subject in the profession, and the demographic maths behind all of it is starting to look impossible. Inheritance tax gets its turn too, now that pensions are being pulled into the estate.And then the quiet crisis nobody solves: no new advisers. The people already in the room are ageing, and the routes in are a big-name academy sausage machine or a small firm willing to take a risk, with almost nothing in between. So where does the next generation actually come from?Three arguments, no fence-sitting, and a guest happy to say the thing out loud.

Ask a room full of advisers whether they have clients affected by special needs or disability, and most will say it is not really their world!Ali Fanshawe, Co-Founder of SENDA, is on the show to explain why that answer is almost always wrong, and why the families sitting quietly in every client bank are among the most exposed to getting the planning wrong.Abraham and Matt both admit, on air, how little the industry really sees of the end client behind the pot of money. From there the conversation gets uncomfortable. Ali makes the case that the junior ISA, marketed as a no-brainer for every parent, can be quietly disastrous for a family whose child may lack mental capacity at eighteen, the moment the money becomes legally theirs. She walks through what she calls the age 18 cliff edge, the reality of the Court of Protection, and how savings in a young person's name can switch off the means-tested benefits and care their whole life is built around.The team then turns to the child trust fund problem hiding in plain sight, the hundreds of thousands of matured accounts whose owners cannot be found or, in many cases, cannot legally reach their own money. Is the regulator's push to trace them a fix, or just passing the problem down the line?In the second half, the panel picks apart the regulator's latest wealth management survey and asks the question nobody in the sector wants to answer: if the market is already this consolidated, how is every firm planning to keep growing? The episode closes on a big platform deal across the Atlantic, what it signals about AI coming for direct-to-consumer advice, and why the human adviser's edge might come down to exactly the kind of care Ali spends her life fighting for.Ali Fanshawe is Co-Founder of SENDA, the specialist body raising standards in special needs financial planning. Hosted by Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher.

A bonus episode, and a look back at the standout conversations from across Adviser 3.0 and its sister show, SoapBox.Six moments worth a second listen. Nick Hutchings of Rockwealth on care fees, the annuities that pay for them, and why a fixed fee changes the whole conversation. Caroline Hawkesley of Craven Street Wealth on the cash sitting on platforms, and whether clients are getting their fair share of the interest. Victoria Hicks of Melo on the growth wobble, and why the hardest decisions a firm owner makes are always about people. Michelle Hoskin on why, after decades, advisers are starting to walk away from one of the biggest names in the business. Rob Edwards of Morningstar on the mega-cap IPOs that dominated the headlines, and why the reality is a lot smaller than the noise. And Victoria returns with her colleague Gaynor Rigby for a thoughtful back and forth on the advice gap, what it really is, and how the profession might close it.Every conversation is available in full wherever you listen. Adviser 3.0 returns to its regular schedule next week.