North backs Striver as the advice workforce runs top-heavy

The shortage of advisers in Australia is usually framed as a demand story, more households wanting advice than there are practitioners licensed to give it.

The harder version is a succession story, and the register captures the underlying evidence. Padua Wealth Data figures show 39.9 per cent of advisers have been in the job for more than 20 years, while only 13 per cent have been practising for fewer than five.

North announces a partnership with Striver, positioning it as an investment in emerging talent rather than a marketing exercise, and hosts Striver’s flagship Brimstone Sydney event at AMP’s Sydney headquarters on 15 September. The event brings students, graduates, career changers and industry leaders together to look at how a career in advice works.

The scale of the shortage of advisers in Australia

The ASIC register shows 15,023 advisers at 9 July 2026, according to Padua Wealth Data. The 2025/26 financial year ends with a net loss of 277, a fall of 1.83 per cent, driven predominantly by the contraction in limited-advice accounting roles serving self-managed super funds.

The 2025 calendar year brings 573 new entrants into the profession, and 435 provisional advisers sit in the pipeline behind them. Wealth Data’s median scenario has the profession settling at 14,796 by 2030.

Set the experience profile against the intake and the replacement problem is obvious. Roughly 6,000 advisers carry more than two decades of experience and will retire over the next 10 to 15 years, and the group arriving to take their place is considerably smaller than the one leaving.

“At Striver, we’re passionate about creating clearer pathways into financial advice and connecting talented people with meaningful careers in the profession,” says Alisdair Barr, founder and chief executive of Striver. “Brimstone brings together students, graduates, career changers and industry leaders to showcase what’s possible in advice.”

First exposure

Brimstone’s record suggests the awareness problem is real. The inaugural Sydney event in September 2023 draws 200 students, 170 of whom are not studying an approved degree, and 85 per cent say afterwards that they would consider advice as a career.

The series runs in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, and Striver has built a partner list that includes Iress, which renews its own arrangement in April this year.

“For many attendees, these events provide their first exposure to the profession and often the moment they realise financial advice can be a rewarding and purpose-driven career” says Barr.

The professional year

Any graduate who leaves the Sydney event excited about joining the profession still has to find a practice willing to fund and supervise a professional year, a period in which the new entrant costs money and bills very little.

Licensees have spent the years after the Hayne royal commission cutting overhead rather than building training capacity, and that capacity has not returned quickly. The 435 provisional advisers currently in the system is the number worth watching, because it counts practices prepared to take someone on rather than students prepared to consider it.

For North, the commercial logic is not hard to follow. Advisers choose a licensee, a platform and a planning software stack early in a career and those choices tend to stick, which is the same conclusion Iress appears to have reached.

Sharyn Baker, director of operations for platforms at AMP, frames the partnership as an extension of North’s existing work with the adviser community rather than a recruitment exercise for the platform.

“Brimstone Sydney is about more than a single event. It’s about bringing together future talent, experienced professionals and industry leaders to help strengthen the profession, expand career pathways and ensure more Australians can access quality financial advice in the years ahead,” Baker says.

Whether that holds depends less on one evening in Sydney and more on how many practices are prepared to carry a professional year through to the other side, the step that will decide whether the shortage of advisers in Australia narrows or widens over the next decade.

Advisers watching their own succession plans have an interest in the answer, because the price of a practice in five years will be set by how many qualified people are available to run it.