There are 35,000 financial advisers in the UK. There are 18 million people who need financial advice and aren't getting it.
The advice gap has a number of causes - cost, access, awareness, the complexity of the advice journey. But one question that comes up more and more in the sector is whether financial content creators, otherwise known as 'finfluencers', could be part of the answer. Or whether they make things more complicated.
Episode 5 of the NewIn Podcast tackles this directly, with two guests who sit on different parts of that spectrum.
Ola graduated into COVID, with closed borders blocking her plans to move to Australia. Stuck at home, she taught herself to invest, and then started teaching other young people to do the same. All Things Money was born from that moment, an online personal finance platform, aimed at young adults who'd had no financial education and didn't know where to start.
Five years on, she's just completed her diploma in financial planning.
"I had a lot of older white men telling me I had no experience, no knowledge in the industry," she says. "Doing my diploma was about adding credibility, and curbing those feelings of imposter syndrome."
She's been podcasting for five years. She's sold out live events. She's encouraged her sister to start investing at 18. And she's built something that genuinely reaches people the traditional advice sector never gets close to.
David Tait, founder of Redmill Advance, provides the counterweight. He cites a stat that stops you in your tracks: there are fewer than 200 people under 25 working in financial services in the UK today.
"That's mad," he says. And he's right. The sector is 55+ and getting more so. Young people aren't coming in. And the platforms where young people do engage with money, like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, are unregulated spaces where the line between education and advice gets crossed regularly.
"Anything that brings awareness to financial planning isn't a bad thing," David says. "But there's a danger that people are listening to some of this and taking it as advice."
The honest answer from this episode is: yes, but carefully. Finfluencers can reach people that qualified advisers never will. They can make money feel approachable, not intimidating. They can get a 22-year-old thinking about their pension, something that almost never happens otherwise.
But, they can't replace advice. And the sector still needs to do more at school anduniversity level, to make sure people know what regulated financial advice actually is and why it matters.
The advice gap is a structural problem. Social media alone won't close it. But it might be the first step for the 18 million.
Hear the full conversation on the NewIn Podcast - available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Amazon Music.
The NewIn podcast is brought to you with thanks to Royal London, Lead Sponsor of the Verve Foundation.
