Advice firms are at risk of losing business if they don’t bring in younger advisers, Bespoke Advice chartered financial planner, Phoebe Lane, has argued.
With many advisers poised for retirement in the coming years, firms can “either stay set in their ways and not put a plan together or move forward,” Lane said.
“The reality is, you’d be a bit silly to not start thinking ahead about how we’re going to continue to service the huge number of clients."
“Otherwise those clients are going to go un-serviced and firms will inevitably lose business.”
Lane said in the last two years at Bespoke Advice, two of her colleagues have retired and she has been part of the journey of taking on some of their clients.
“If I hadn't gone through the apprenticeship and there wasn’t a young adviser to do that, we wouldn’t have been able to help them,” she said.
“You can therefore see how important it is to have young advisers coming through to fill that gap.”
However, Lane warned it could take years for the recruitment of young advisers to take effect.
“When I talk to my firm’s new apprentices I always tell them that the future is so positive for us as a collective," said Lane
To fill this adviser gap, Lane said promotion of the career opportunities should be “more widespread”.
While she was doing her A-Levels, she said university open days were common but there was no equivalent for apprenticeships like Bespoke Advice’s scheme.
“You can go other ways, such as getting into schools or putting on apprenticeship events where you can promote your firm and let people know that apprenticeships are out there,” she said.
“It’s really about getting the word out there about the profession and making sure it is more visible to young people.
“It’s also about getting out of the old ways of the industry and asking what’s new, what can we do differently, how can we look forward?”
Career journey
Lane outlined her own journey into the industry and what had drawn her to the profession. After finishing her A-Levels in 2019she was not sure what she wanted to do in the future.
“This was at a time when apprenticeships were still very new and the university route was the go to option,” she said.
She said didn’t want to go to university “for the sake of it” and decided to take a year off where she worked at a supermarket.
Then, Bespoke Advice, where her mum Suzi Lane is a managing director, brought in its apprenticeship scheme.
“That landed on my lap, really, and it would have been stupid to say no,” Lane stated.
She said she was always interested in financial services, after seeing her mother working in it but felt there opportunities to enter it were not widely available.
