Financial Planner Life Podcast

How do you become a financial adviser on a salary, without the financial risk of going self-employed? Jason Howard, Founder & CEO of Insight Associates, and Greg Ryan, Performance Director at Insight Associates, join Sam Oakes on Financial Planner Life to explain how they train, pay and mentor new financial advisers and financial planners, and why 37% of their advisers are under 30.

Find out more about Insight Associates

Jason started in financial planning in 1989, commission only, and ended up in hospital. When he went it alone in 2001, the man he had joined turned out to be a fraudster who took £1.7 million from the public. Jason's team paid everybody back through hard work, not one member of staff left, and they spent the next two decades quietly building Insight Associates.

Today Insight Associates has financial advisers in the 60s, has acquired 33 businesses and is aiming for 100 financial advisers by January 2028. Its employed advisers are paid so they can focus on clients rather than bills, are mentored in small groups of three to four, and are handed clients by senior financial planners who "give up to grow".

QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS EPISODE

How can you become a financial adviser without going self-employed?
Insight Associates uses an employed route. Jason says nobody can do proper planning with a client while worrying about paying their own bills, so the firm covers what he calls the hygiene factors and expects effort and activity in return.

How many financial advisers at Insight Associates are under 30?
37% of the advisory business, and in the employed part of the firm Jason puts it at more like 50%. Some of their young advisers look after clients old enough to be their grandparents.

Where do new financial advisers get clients from?
Senior financial planners pass clients down. Advisers are paid on the value of their book, so when one gives up a client paying £6,000 a year in fees, the adviser who receives it gets a pay rise.

Is Insight Associates recruiting financial advisers?
Yes. The target is 100 financial advisers by January 2028, with a head office in Norwich and offices in Westerham and north London.

ALSO IN THIS EPISODE
• Why mentors at Insight Associates get no pay rise, and queue up to do it anyway
• The 15 minutes after a live client meeting where Greg says the real learning happens
• BASS: what comes after competent adviser status
• The 90-day development programme and why discipline beats motivation
• Why Jason encourages his advisers to take 153 free days a year

This episode is for anyone thinking about how to become a financial adviser or financial planner, paraplanners ready to step up, career changers, and financial planning firm owners building their next generation.

KEY MOMENTS
02:51 Starting in financial planning in 1989, commission only
09:23 How Insight Associates paid back £1.7 million
13:23 Why 37% of Insight Associates's advisers are under 30
19:01 Why trainee financial advisers need financial security
24:33 Why mentors get no pay increase
29:33 BASS: business adviser status
34:27 The 90-day development programme
39:56 Where new financial advisers get clients
45:18 100 financial advisers by 2028
49:52 Free days, focus days and buffer days
54:24 From support role to financial planner: Johnny's story

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://fpl.partners/insight-ifa-pod-ep
Connect with Jason Howard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-howard-insight/
Want to feature on Financial Planner Life, or work with FPL Productions? https://fpl.partners/work-pod

Financial Planner Life is the UK podcast for financial planners, financial advisers and paraplanners, hosted by Sam Oakes.

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production. 

Find out more about Aberdeen Adviser: https://fpl.partners/aberdeen-adviser
Connect with Derek Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-smith-b687721/

Why does the financial advice process still take seven systems and seven hours? Derek Smith, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Aberdeen Adviser, joins Sam Oakes on Financial Planner Life to explain what is broken for UK financial advisers and financial planners, who is to blame, and how AI could fix it.

A financial adviser finishes a client meeting and then starts typing. The same details go into seven different systems, and roughly seven hours disappear into keying a single advice process before any advice is written.

Derek has spent 27 years in product and technology, across investment banking, trading, start-ups and a fashion tech company. He says the software financial advice firms use is about 20 years behind the apps on your phone. He calls the problem the three sevens: seven pieces of software, seven hours of keying, client data rekeyed up to seven times. Aberdeen Adviser supports around 2,500 financial advice firms and £80 billion of assets, takes roughly 350,000 calls a year, and believes 70% of those calls exist only because of friction in the advice process.

QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS EPISODE

Who is to blame for the broken financial advice process?
Derek says it is shared. The advice firm owns the end-to-end journey for its client. Platforms and advice tech providers own their part of it, and have been too slow to work together across it.

How much does it cost a financial planning firm to serve one client?
On average £1,500 to £2,500 a year across the firm's whole cost base. That is why many financial planners will not take on a client with less than £250,000, and why 30 to 40% of a typical financial planning book is unprofitable at any one time.

Why are financial advisers serving fewer clients?
Five years ago the average UK financial adviser served 120 to 125 clients. Today it is around 100, and the advice gap is widening.

Can AI reduce the cost of financial advice?
Derek believes a financial advice firm built from scratch today, on connected data and AI, could serve a client for under £500 a year, within 12 to 18 months.

What should financial planners do in the next six months?
Test conversational AI tools that work across your data now, and redesign your advice and service processes end to end rather than chasing 1% improvements.

ALSO IN THIS EPISODE
• How Aberdeen Adviser is handing back a million minutes of adviser time
• CRM integrations with Intelliflo and ZeroKey that end rekeying
• The data quality problem that makes AI risky in a regulated advice firm
• How Derek would build a financial advice firm from day one
• Why a one-person financial advice firm could be 18 to 24 months away

This episode is for financial advisers, financial planners, paraplanners and advice firm owners weighing up their tech stack, how far down the asset scale they can afford to serve, or whether to start building with AI now.

Find out more about Aberdeen Adviser: https://fpl.partners/aberdeen-adviser
Connect with Derek Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-smith-b687721/

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production. 

Learn more about The Openwork Partnership 

How do you move from employed administrator and paraplanner to self-employed financial adviser, business owner and appointed representative of The Openwork Partnership?

In this Financial Planner Life podcast, Sam Oakes speaks with Rose Hawkins, founder of Pebble Rose Wealth, about financial adviser training, self-employment and building a financial planning business within The Openwork Partnership network.

Rose joined the first Openwork Partnership Route to Principal cohort intending to buy the practice she had worked in since she was 18. A succession plan was being discussed, funding was available and an established client bank was waiting.

Seven modules later, Rose changed direction and launched her own company.

In her first 12 months as a self-employed financial adviser, Rose generated £4 million of assets under management through accountant introductions, Openwork mortgage adviser referrals and recommendations from existing clients.

Rose explains why she became an appointed representative of The Openwork Partnership rather than establishing a directly authorised financial advice firm. For employed advisers, paraplanners and IFAs comparing a financial adviser network with going directly authorised, this is an honest account of the support, opportunities and responsibilities involved.

OPENWORK PARTNERSHIP SUPPORT

Rose discusses:

• Openwork Business School and CII exam training
• Route to Principal and Partnering for Growth
• Partnership Development Managers
• Supervisory, quality and regulatory support
• Adviser introductions and network referrals
• Mortgage, protection and wealth opportunities
• Marketing, technology and acquisition funding

Rose began at 18 through an apprenticeship, working four days in administration and studying for one. Administration became paraplanning. Paraplanning became responsibility for a client bank. She then gained her Openwork wealth licence, achieved competent adviser status and became self-employed.

The episode explores how administration and paraplanning build technical knowledge, confidence and client experience. Rose also shares the reality of running a one-person practice while finding clients, marketing the business and working towards Chartered Financial Planner status.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Employed to self-employed financial adviser
• Appointed representative network versus directly authorised IFA
• How Openwork Route to Principal changed Rose’s succession plan
• Building Pebble Rose Wealth instead of buying a practice
• Generating £4 million of AUM in 12 months
• Support available through The Openwork Partnership
• Administration and paraplanning routes into financial advice
• CII gap fill, Chartered status and mortgage licensing
• Partnering for Growth and Rose’s expansion plans
• Walking away from buying an Openwork practice
• Starting a financial planning apprenticeship at 18
• Thirteen years in an Openwork advice firm
•  Administrator and paraplanner to financial adviser
• CII Level 4, AF exams and Chartered status
• Rose’s career within The Openwork Partnership
• Openwork Business School training
• Credibility as a young female adviser
• Women in financial planning careers
• Openwork wealth licence and competent adviser status
• Employed to self-employed financial adviser
• Openwork Route to Principal
• The module that changed her business plan
• Starting a financial planning business
• Openwork support for an appointed representative
• Running a one-person financial planning practice
• Generating £4 million of AUM in year one
• Mindset for self-employed advisers
• Adding an Openwork mortgage adviser licence
• Family financial planning and generational wealth
• Openwork Partnering for Growth

ABOUT THE OPENWORK PARTNERSHIP

The Openwork Partnership is one of the UK’s largest and most established financial advice networks, with almost 5,000 financial advisers across more than 800 firms and a history spanning over 50 years.

It supports appointed representative firms and self-employed financial advisers with authorisation, oversight, training, technology and business development across wealth, mortgage and protection advice.

The Openwork Partnership is a trading style of Openwork Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Join The Openwork Partnership: 👉 https://bit.ly/Openworkjobs

ABOUT FINANCIAL PLANNER LIFE

Financial Planner Life shares UK financial adviser careers, IFA business stories, paraplanning, financial planner training, self-employment and appointed representative opportunities.

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production. 

Learn more about the St. James's Place Academy

When a financial adviser retires, their clients do not retire with them. Somebody has to be ready to pick up those relationships, and the profession is not currently producing enough people to do it.

Sam Oakes welcomes back Gee Foottit, who leads the St James’s Place Academy, the longest running adviser training programme in the profession, to talk through what has changed for 2026.

Almost 50% of financial advisers in the UK are over 50, and fewer than 30% are under 40. The Academy was built as a succession plan, and it has ended up shaping the whole market. Of everyone appointed as a new financial adviser last year, over half came through this one programme.

Gee and Sam Oakes walk the route in order: the six CII exams, the three terms, the selection process, and the two ways out of the Academy into either your own practice or an existing one.

The Academy makes over 500 changes to the programme in an average year. Term two has already been cut from three months to nine weeks on the back of delegate feedback, so new advisers reach clients sooner and take a shallower dip in earnings on the way.

Essential listening for anybody weighing up a move into financial advice, and for practice owners thinking about succession and recruitment. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Why over half of last year’s new advisers came out of a single academy
• The real answer on financial support during training, including the £2,000 a month figure
• How a first time pass rate of around 90% is achieved in a profession averaging 55% to 60%
• The contract question new advisers forget to ask
• What is new for 2026: a dedicated business owners programme and five areas of coaching
• Why capital value changes the maths on taking a pay cut to retrain
• The Outgrow Your Career campaign, and the 18% problem behind it

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production. 

An adviser told Brian McLaughlin he was about to disengage 300 clients because he simply could not service them anymore. He did not want to. He just could not see another option.

Brian McLaughlin is the founder of Pillar Client Services, and he has spent 27 years in financial services, from Prudential through to Rathbones and Octopus. Two and a half years of MBA research took him inside around 250 IFA firms, and what he found was a time problem dressed up as a client problem.

Firms know they carry a tail of clients who cost more to look after than they bring in. Very few can put a number on it at client level. Pillar Lens plugs into the back office system and does exactly that, showing what each individual client costs to serve. Pillar Client Services then runs the reviews on those clients under the firm's own brand, so the client sees continuity while the adviser gets the time back.

The headline from the research, drawn from roughly 150 firms: between 44% and 72% of the average advice book costs more to serve than it generates.

This one is for financial planners, IFA principals, practice managers, and anyone buying or selling an advice book.

In this episode:

• The stat that stops most principals in their tracks, and why recency bias hides it
• Why "my best clients" is a feeling, and what the data says instead
• How 100 clients end up carrying 70 to 80% of a firm's revenue
• The three options every firm has with a subthreshold book, and why two of them hurt
• What clients actually notice when reviews move to a white label team
• How 340 hours goes back into a business, and what firms do with it
• Why a clean review trail protects the firm as much as the client

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production. 

A paraplanner sits down on a Monday morning to write one new business suitability report and loses most of the day to it. The document runs to 40+ pages. The client takes it home after a one hour meeting and, if we are honest, reads about five of them.

Sam Oakes is joined by Jack Sleator, co-founder of Templi and a former paraplanner and adviser who spent five years inside UK advice firms before he started building software for them. Jack went from a graduate admin scheme at a large Irish wealth manager, into paraplanning at a national firm in Newcastle, then into advice at an IFA, before co-founding Templi in 2024.

Templi started life as a suitability report writing tool and relaunched as a connector that sits across the systems advice firms already use, automating the work in between client meetings. That shift is the heart of this conversation. Writing the report faster is the easy win. What happens to the paraplanner career path, to accountability, and to the 40 page document itself is the much harder question, and Jack does not dodge any of it.

In a survey of 209 advisers, suitability report writing came out as the single biggest bottleneck in the advice workflow, taking around three hours on average. Jack has customers who have cut that to 20 minutes. He is also the first to say that a time saving in one place does not change what an advice business is capable of.

This episode is built for paraplanners, financial advisers and firm owners who want a straight answer on what AI actually changes inside a regulated advice business, rather than another round of provider marketing.

EPISODE TAKEAWAYS:

• Why Jack thinks the paraplanner role survives, and which tasks he expects to disappear first

• The uncomfortable gap behind a 74% AI adoption rate and a 6.2 out of 10 efficiency score

• The reason your data does not need to be perfect before you start, only reachable

• What happens to the junior career ladder when AI handles the letters of authority

• The one question to ask an AI output before you put your name on it

• Whether the 40 page suitability report deserves to survive at all

• Where to start on Monday morning if your firm has not touched AI yet

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production. 

Almost nobody in financial services can explain what an employee benefits consultant actually does all day, which is strange for a specialism that sits inside most of the big advice firms in the UK.

Sam Oakes is joined by Natalie Malone, who leads the Risk and Reward team within Titan Wealth's corporate division. Natalie has spent almost 17 years in this part of the profession, starting in junior support roles and working her way up to running a specialist team of healthcare and group risk consultants.

Her clients are businesses rather than individuals, so the people she advises are HR directors, finance directors and, in smaller firms, the CEO. The job is to build a wellbeing strategy that keeps staff healthy, engaged and at work, then justify every pound of it with data the business can see for itself.

Rising private medical premiums, group income protection, salary exchange, early intervention on long term absence, menopause awareness, neurodiversity support: all of it sits alongside corporate pensions and individual advice, and all of it is regularly bought, filed and forgotten by the businesses paying for it.

Key takeaways:

●Why an employer's greatest asset is the exact thing most benefits packages fail to protect properly

●The difference between risk and reward, and why confusing them costs businesses money

●How claims data turns a nervous employer into a convinced one

●What early intervention really means, and why the target is the people who are struggling but not yet signed off

●Why Natalie will not call herself a broker

● What she looks for when hiring, and the one thing she says cannot be taught

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production. 

Financial planners are sitting on a confidence problem: a 70% opportunity gap when it comes to closing, and it is costing them business they should be winning.

Chris Larkin, founder of training consultancy BigRock, returns to the podcast alongside Mark Rockliffe, CEO of Pembroke Financial Planning, to unpack what is really behind that number and what Pembroke has done differently over the past 12 months, growing from around 80 to 170 people along the way.

BigRock's Advisor Advantage diagnostic tool, completed by hundreds of Financial Planner Life listeners, found this audience scoring 48% higher than the industry average on protecting time before and after client meetings, one of several results Chris and Mark break down in this episode.

For financial planners, advisers and business owners in financial services who want to close more consultatively, not more aggressively.

Key takeaways:

●Why "are you happy to go ahead?" is the only closing line advisers need

● The acronym BigRock uses to turn a client's own words into the reason they act

●What a 137% gap in structured objection handling is really telling the industry

●Why only 9% of UK adults take financial planning advice

●How Pembroke grew from 80 to 170 people without changing what “selling” means to its advisers

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production. 

Jeanne Mpondo asked a room full of women in London whether anybody there was investing in anything. Not one hand went up. She then asked who owned their home or held a pension, and hands went up all over the room.

Jeanne Mpondo is a St. James's Place partner running her own practice in London, and a former senior data analyst at S&P Global. She came into financial planning by accident, after helping her uncle raise the funding for long term care.

She talks to Sam Oakes about coming through the St. James's Place Academy with three children at home, choosing to build her own practice from nothing rather than inherit a client bank, and specialising in women who are independent business owners and senior executives in the city. Running underneath it all is a language problem: the profession keeps describing money in words that do not match how a lot of clients experience their own.

Around 56% of the world's wealth is expected to be in the hands of women from 2027. Jeanne is candid about what she has learned about actually reaching that client, from the 37 to 45 age window she works in to the reason her clients book that first meeting on their own.

Key Takeaways:

• The question that emptied a room of raised hands, and what it revealed about how clients hear the word investing

• Why her female clients come to the first meeting alone, and what changes when the spouse finally joins

• The asset most women overlook in a divorce until the negotiation has already moved past it

• What a career break quietly costs a pension by 60, and the window to make it back

• Why she tells anyone eyeing the partner route to bank two to three years of resources first

• The half of the qualification nobody warns you about, and it is not the exams

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production. 

 Towards the end of her ten years in law, Imogen worked out that fifteen hour days for three and a half months would get her to the billable hours she needed for her bonus. She did it, hit the number, and then handed in her notice. 

Sam Oakes speaks to Imogen Winfield, Paraplanner and soon to be qualified financial planner at City Gate Financial Planning, about the five month career break that became a complete change of profession. 

Imogen spent a decade at a US law firm, qualifying into litigation and working on commercial disputes and investigations with a financial services focus. Her clients were institutional investors, hedge funds and ultra high net worth individuals. What she did not have was control over her own time, and partnership, the destination everyone else was working towards, was the part that appealed least. 

She took an 84% pay cut to join City Gate, the largest pay cut that Sam has come across from anyone entering the profession. She started as operations manager, moved into paraplanning within four months, and is now close to being signed off as a competent adviser. 

Key takeaways: 

• Why partnership does not mean taking your foot off the gas, from someone who watched it up close 

• The billable hours maths that produced fifteen hour days for three and a half months 

• The single question that made financial planning click, and it had nothing to do with returns 

• Why lawyers on six figures need advice years before they think they do 

• What an operations role teaches a career changer that an admin role never will 

• The cashflow assumption almost every adviser gets wrong about high earning lawyers 

Financial Planner Life is sponsored by Redmill Advance

Whether you're starting out, already qualified, or building a training academy, Redmill Advance delivers expert-led learning, exam support and CPD from Level 4 to Chartered.

✅ Trusted by top UK firms

👉 www.redmilladvance.com/fpl

Be sure to follow Financial Planner Life on YouTube for extra content about  career development within Financial Planning. 

Want to appear on the Financial Planner Life podcast? Reach out to [email protected]

Reach out to [email protected] in regards to sponsorship, partnerships, videography or podcast production.