Industry stability needed to attract young entrants
The financial advice industry needs to demonstrate its resilience as a sector in order to be seen as an attractive long-term career and to keep on attracting younger people, according to Lifespan Financial Planning.
Speaking to Money Management, Lifespan’s chief executive, Eugene Ardino, said although there was still more to be done by the industry participants to make it an attractive profession for the younger cohort, the most important component was the sector’s predictability.
“I think the industry needs to stabilise a bit, it is a lot to ask someone who is fresh out of the university to do a Professional Year and come to an industry that is constantly changing with no idea where you are going to be three years after you are in,” he said.
“It is very difficult to support a professional year people, and only bigger businesses can do that.”
Ironically, he said, the bigger players were often the institutionally-aligned groups who had already left the room.
“I also think that as industry participants, there is probably a lot more we can do like getting more involved in graduate programmes with universities, but a lot of this is also about building a profile of the profession, to build the awareness and letting potential entrants know what is all about,” Ardino added.
“And at the moment, there is not a great story there as everybody is tight and stressed and things are changing very often.
“So, I think we are going to see a few more years of large numbers of advisers exiting. But I personally think this actually needs to start at the very top at the government that needs to provide us a little bit of stability first.
“I think that it will be a few years before you start to see anything close to the numbers of new entrants, going back to before the Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority (FASEA) regime, which started a few years ago, and you had a really nice steady flow of new advisers coming in every month irrespective of what the industry was doing to promote itself.”
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