While financials and materials dominated trades leading into 2024, the popularity of other sectors like healthcare and information technology followed generational, and even demographic, lines.
The representative working group is lobbying the government for a broader section of study to be eligible for credit within the ‘equivalent degree’ requirement for advisers in the hope that more people will be encouraged to join the profession.
Start counting the ways AI can help an advice business grow
The rise of artificial intelligence in 2023 will be a boon for the financial planning industry globally according to a panel of industry commentators, and add an efficiency-boosting ‘co-pilot’ to the existing suite of adviser tools.
While the rise of generative language AI tools like ChatGPT has taken the world by storm this year, gaining more users in faster time than any other application to date, their arrival has been treated with suspicion by some. Similar to the arrival of robo-advice provision in the early 2010s, skepticism about its overall application, combined with fear over its ability to supplant the adviser role, has clouded its potential.
Yet AI tools have the ability to greatly benefit the adviser community and act as a value-add for advisers, commentators say.
In his role as CEO of the Financial Planning Standards Board, US-based former Financial Planning Association chief executive Dante De Gori has spent the last year travelling to adviser hubs all over the world. He says that in Johannesburg, South Africa, for example, where he was meeting with advisers last week, AI and “how we can use it to better serve clients” was a central theme.
The issue is “mostly positive” he added, but some advisers do harbour concerns about how technology could impact their role or doubt about how effectively AI could help them. These are a minority, however.
“Driving customer centric transformation, basically been able to really personalise your interaction with prospective clients… I think there’s gonna be a great opportunity,” he said on stage at The Financial Advice Association of Australia national conference in Adelaide. “Accelerating digital transformation to your business, AI can help assist in that process as well.”
Redefining advice
According to Jacqui Henderson from Advice Intelligence, AI and the onset of the “fourth industrial revolution” will bring about a “redefinition” of the advice service model, and is set to assist advisers in three clear ways.
The first one is around financial education, and the ability of AI to produce and deliver tailored content to clients on behalf of an adviser.
“So if you had a base of particular clients that may not understand an asset class or they may not understand risk, you can use generative AI to create content and identify what cohorts need to be delivered that education material,” Henderson said on a panel at the 2023 Financial Advice Association National Conference in Adelaide this week.
The second one, she explained, is advice modelling.
“So being able to have a modeling tool that sits with you, in the with the client, to translate and model different future scenarios for a client and the different types of bias strategies that the client can take in order to achieve a better outcome for their financial future,” she said.
The third way AI can help advice businesses is via practice productivity, Henderson ventured, especially when it comes to scanning Statements of Advice and identifying compliance breaches.
