Designing advice that works for everyone

This is a report about participation in financial advice: who takes part, who holds back and why. Before this becomes about your clients, it first begins with you.

How many statements from both lists could have applied to you? The experiences aren’t identical, but they overlap more than we often imagine and they can belong to anyone.

Can you now think about:

• the quietest client you met this month?
• the client who has postponed their first meeting with you three times?
• the client who seemed like they were about to tell you more and then stopped?

They may have been asking themselves exactly the same questions.

This report started life as research into women and wealth. It became research into something much bigger: the participation gap in financial advice.

The findings are based on NextWealth research: surveys and structured interviews with advisers and with both advised and non-advised consumers, selected to represent a range of backgrounds, gender and experience.

We expected to uncover barriers preventing women from accessing financial advice.

Instead, we found barriers that affect how people participate in financial advice once they arrive, and even before they make first contact.

Women experience many of these barriers more acutely. But they are not unique to women.

They affect:

• The quieter partner in a review meeting
• People who prefer to delegate financial decisions
• Anyone who feels they ‘should’ understand pensions and investments before meeting an adviser
• People experiencing major life changes that they don’t associate as financial advice events
• People who don’t feel they’ve found the adviser they can truly open up to.

This isn’t the ‘advice gap’. This impacts people with over £100,000 in investable assets, sometimes sat in cash for years while they orbit the idea of getting financial advice. It impacts the quieter partner in an advised relationship with over £1m of jointly held assets who hasn’t seen the value in attending a meeting for years. It impacts an advised client with newly sole control over a large estate who smiles and nods and says, ‘thank you, it sounds fine’, but leaves a meeting unsure.

This report started life as research into women and wealth. It became research into something much bigger: the participation gap in financial advice.”

From April 2027, the inheritance tax changes affecting unused pensions will turn what has often been a hidden participation issue into a commercial and client risk. The surviving spouse may already have suddenly become the primary decision-maker following a bereavement. But if they have never fully participated in the advice relationship, the surviving spouse and family could also be facing a significant inheritance tax bill at exactly the moment they are least prepared.

This is the participation gap.

It represents one of the biggest commercial opportunities for advice firms.

The firms that succeed will design advice that enables more people to participate meaningfully in the style that works for them.

* Participation: finding advice, feeling welcome, understanding enough to engage, having your voice heard, remaining involved through life’s transitions, elevating advice to be about life, when it happens.

1. This is a participation gap, not primarily an advice gap. Many people who could benefit from advice never fully engage with it, and some never make first contact. Routes into advice still run on referrals.
2. The biggest commercial opportunity is increasing participation among the households firms already advise. Many advised households have one client and one passenger.
3. Clients shouldn’t need to become financial experts to benefit from expert advice. Nearly half of consumers say their adviser uses terms they don’t understand.
4. Participation isn’t fixed. It looks different for different people and at different life moments, and there isn’t yet a playbook for many of the transitions clients actually experience.
5. Women experience participation barriers more often and more acutely, but they’re not the only people affected.

There are clear numeric differences between male and female participation in advice and there are many historic reasons for why we are where we are. We won’t try to address those in this report.

Instead, let’s imagine where we want to be: an industry in which people who want to participate in advice are able to meaningfully do so in the way that works for them.

For that to be the case, we believe certain conditions would need to be true:

If we’ve closed the participation gap, would we find: