Financial Planner Life Podcast

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. 

Rebecca Ellis became a Chartered Fellow in her early twenties, but becoming a financial adviser wasn’t her immediate next step.

Today, she is Head of Advice at Titan Wealth International in Dubai, with experience spanning technical financial planning, paraplanning, international advice, operations and leadership.

In this episode of the Financial Planner Life Podcast, in partnership with Titan Wealth, Sam Oakes speaks with Rebecca about her career journey and the range of opportunities available within financial planning.

Rebecca initially studied accounting and finance at university before switching to a financial planning degree. The course provided exemptions towards her professional qualifications and helped her progress towards Chartered and Fellow status.

However, qualifications didn’t automatically make her feel ready to advise clients. Instead, Rebecca built experience through administration, paraplanning and technical financial planning. They discuss the difference between technical knowledge and real-world confidence, the value of developing depth early in a career and whether young professionals feel pressure to progress too quickly.

Rebecca also reflects on the importance of female role models. Working alongside a successful female adviser who had progressed through administration and paraplanning helped her see what was possible in a profession where women remain underrepresented.

After moving from the UK to Dubai, Rebecca developed a career in international and cross-border financial planning. She explains the complexities of working with internationally mobile clients who may live in one country, hold assets in another and eventually return to the UK, as well as the importance of technical expertise and collaboration across jurisdictions.
The conversation also explores Rebecca’s role at Titan Wealth International. Her responsibilities now extend beyond technical advice and supporting financial planners to include operations, business integration, acquisitions and wider group initiatives.

Rebecca has participated in Titan Wealth’s Next Generation Leaders programme, and completing an MBA has strengthened her interest in business strategy and leadership.

This episode challenges the idea that becoming a financial adviser is the only career destination in financial planning. Opportunities also exist in paraplanning, technical advice, operations, proposition development, leadership, strategy and international planning.

In this episode we discuss:
• Financial planning degrees and apprenticeships
• Becoming Chartered early in your career
• Qualifications versus real-world experience
• Administration, paraplanning and technical planning careers
• Women and female leadership in financial planning
• Moving from the UK to Dubai
• International and cross-border financial planning
• Working with internationally mobile clients
• Careers at Titan Wealth International
• Titan Wealth’s Next Generation Leaders programme
• Moving into business strategy
• Career opportunities beyond becoming a financial adviser 

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. 

After 13 years inside a financial advice network, Wayne Griffith and One Financial Solutions have become directly authorised by the FCA.

But what does it really take to become a directly authorised financial advice firm? How long does FCA authorisation take, what are the risks, and when is the right time to leave a network?

Wayne joins Sam Oakes on the Financial Planner Life Podcast to share the full story behind One Financial Solutions becoming directly authorised.

The process took around 18 months, including nine months of preparation followed by a demanding nine-month FCA application. Wayne speaks honestly about the interviews, capital adequacy requirements, compliance responsibilities and the steep learning curve that comes with taking full accountability for a financial advice business.

He also explains why the FCA was far more supportive than he expected and how compliance consultancy 360 helped prepare the business for direct authorisation.

Why did One Financial Solutions become directly authorised?

For Wayne, it came down to greater control, accountability and agility. He wanted the freedom to shape the firm’s investment proposition, decide which advisers joined the business, develop future advisers and build a privately owned company capable of creating long-term wealth for its people.

This is not an attack on financial advice networks. Wayne explains why networks remain essential, particularly for new advisers and smaller firms that need a “business in a box.” After 13 years of support, One Financial Solutions had simply reached a stage where its ambitions required greater independence.

In this episode, we explore:

• How to become directly authorised by the FCA
• How long the FCA authorisation process can take
• The true cost and responsibility of becoming directly authorised
• The difference between a directly authorised firm and an appointed representative
• Why financial advice networks remain valuable
• Capital adequacy, compliance and FCA interviews
• Building a centralised investment proposition
• Creating generational wealth for financial advisers
• One Financial Solutions’ plan to grow to 100 advisers
• Training trainee and junior financial planners
• Why new advisers should learn marketing and build a niche
• Neurodiversity within financial planning firms
• How AI could change administration, paraplanning and client service

Should your financial advice firm become directly authorised?

Wayne’s answer is clear: direct authorisation is not automatically better. It depends on the size, experience, resources and long-term ambitions of the business. A network can provide valuable protection and infrastructure. Direct authorisation provides greater control, but also places far more responsibility on the firm and its leadership team.

If you are considering leaving a network, applying for FCA authorisation or joining a growing directly authorised financial advice firm, this episode gives you a refreshingly honest view of what lies ahead.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Wayne Griffith’s big announcement
01:10 Why One Financial Solutions became directly authorised
02:19 Working with the FCA and 360
04:40 Why financial advice networks are valuable
06:17 When a network may stop fitting your business
07:50 Control, accountability and generational wealth
12:00 The reality of the FCA application process
14:10 Training the next generation of advisers
20:24 Marketing, lead generation and building a niche
23:55 Neurodiversity in financial planning
30:36 AI, upskilling and serving the mass market
34:24 The future of One Financial Solutions
42:49 The Hundred Club growth plan
48:28 How to contact Wayne Griffith

Learn more about One Financial Solutions at www.onefinancialsolutions.co.uk 

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. 

Trevor Greetham, Head of Multi-Asset at Royal London Asset Management, still measures market timing with a clock face borrowed from a 1930s newspaper. 

The idea dates back to a reference Trevor found from the London Evening Standard, a clock face marking out stages of the economic cycle: recession, recovery, late cycle, slowdown, each paired with the assets that historically perform well there. The problem, he explains, is that confirming exactly where you sit on that clock in real time is nearly impossible. Recessions are usually only confirmed months after they start, by which point markets have already moved on without you.

Rather than guessing, Trevor's team at Royal London reads growth and inflation directly to estimate the current position. Falling inflation paired with strengthening growth points to recovery, favouring stocks. A slowdown paired with rising inflation points to stagflation, favouring commodities. This year, that reading has pointed to stagflation, with tensions in the Middle East cited as the driver, and it feeds directly into the team's daily tactical positioning.

The conversation also brings in Robin Ellis, Director of Portfolio Management at St. James's Place, who talks through how Saint James's Place selects and vets the fund managers advisers ultimately rely on. He's candid about a trap he fell into earlier in his career, mistaking a confident conference speaker for a genuinely strong investment process, and why SJP now runs a weekly adviser podcast and curates its annual investment conference specifically to avoid that mistake. Trevor also explains why the phrase "passive multi-asset" doesn't really make sense to him, since clients rarely come to an adviser asking for a specific asset class, they come with a savings goal and a risk appetite that needs blending into a portfolio, not a label.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• How the investment clock framework has been used to read markets since the 1930s
• Why knowing exactly where you are in the economic cycle in real time is nearly impossible
• How Trevor's team uses growth and inflation indicators instead of guesswork
• Why this year's read has pointed to stagflation, and what that means for portfolio positioning
• Why Trevor believes "passive multi-asset" is a phrase that doesn't really hold up
• Why a great conference speaker isn't always a sign of a great investment team
• How St. James's Place vets and curates the fund managers advisers ultimately rely on
• Why SJP runs a weekly adviser podcast alongside its annual investment conference

This episode is for financial advisers who want a clearer framework for reading market cycles, and for anyone curious about how professional portfolio managers actually separate a good pitch from a genuinely good process.

Learn more about Royal London Asset Management at royallondon.com , and about St. James's Place at sjp.co.uk. 

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.