The Future of Financial Planning 2026

Then. Now. Next.

Seven years ago, I made a series of predictions about where financial planning was heading. Some landed. Some are still on their way. A few were wide of the mark. And one development changed almost everything – and almost nobody saw it coming. This is an honest audit of those predictions, a frank assessment of where the profession stands today, and a new set of bold forecasts for the next seven years.

Part 1 – The 2019 Predictions: An Honest Audit

In 2019, I wrote an article called The Future of Financial Planning – a look at where financial advice in the UK was heading and what the profession needed to do to meet it. Seven years on, I have revisited every prediction with fresh eyes – and scored them as honestly as I can. This is not a victory lap. It is a genuine reckoning. 

The scoring is simple:

✅ Right
⚠️ Partial or Early
❌ Wrong or Not Yet. 

Technology and The Hybrid Model 

Original prediction: “The hybrid model, combining technology with human interaction, will soon replace traditional face-to-face advice as the preferred method of service delivery.”

✅ The hybrid model is now the profession’s default. The pandemic collapsed a decade of slow progress into twelve months. Virtual meetings, digital onboarding and remote advice are standard. Firms that resisted have been restructuring ever since. 

✅ DIY investing platforms have brought financial engagement to millions. Vanguard, Nutmeg, Interactive Investor and others now serve a segment that traditional advice never reached. 

✅ The $4.3trn I cited in computer-run equity strategies in 2019 – a figure drawn from The Economist at the time – looks conservative in hindsight. Passive and systematic strategies now dominate global markets in a way that was still contested when I wrote this.

The Rise of Financial Coaching and Wellbeing

Original prediction: “The shift towards financial coaching will continue; helping clients decide what matters most to them, working to remove self-limiting beliefs and using behavioural insight to keep them on track.”

✅ Financial wellbeing is now mainstream – and regulatory expectation. The FCA’s Consumer Duty (2023) requires firms to demonstrate client outcomes, not just process compliance. That is, structurally, a wellbeing framework written into regulation. 

✅ Behavioural finance is no longer a niche discipline. The coaching conversation – around what money is for, what clients actually fear, what a good life looks like – is now recognised as the highest-value part of what advisers do.

VR, Gamification and Wearable Tech

Original prediction: “Imagine a cashflow model brought to life through a VR headset… gamification can be brought to life through wearable tech.”

⚠️ Gamification has arrived in fintech – Monzo, Revolut and others use nudges and progress mechanics to encourage better financial behaviour. The depth isn’t there yet. 

❌ VR in financial planning has not materialised. The technology exists. The application hasn’t been built. This remains the most ambitious prediction – and the most unfinished opportunity in the profession. 

AI and Evidence-Based Planning 

Original prediction: “The rise of AI-supported evidence-based financial planning is inevitable. The need for subjective views from an adviser will become redundant.”

✅ When I wrote this in 2019, I was thinking it would take decades. In reality, ChatGPT launched in 2022, and within two years AI was drafting suitability letters, analysing pensions, and answering complex client queries at firms across the profession. 

⚠️ An important caveat… Most firms are missing a critical distinction: admin friction should be removed; signal friction – the hesitation, the silence, the moment a client isn’t sure what they want – is the insight. AI that can’t tell the difference will optimise for the wrong thing. 

“You can’t AI your way out of a bad plan. AI amplifies your process. It doesn’t fix a bad one.”

Financial Planning Avatars and Voice 

Original prediction: “Imagine saying ‘Hey Google, how much income will I receive when I retire?’ Financial Planning Avatars will allow clients to participate more readily in their financial plan.”

⚠️ The technology infrastructure now exists. Open Banking is live. AI is capable of natural language financial conversations. Voice assistants are ubiquitous. The integration hasn’t arrived – primarily for regulatory and liability reasons, not technological ones. When it does, it will move fast. 

Brain-Computer Interface

Original prediction: “BCI will give us the ability to share full sensory and emotional experiences; the ability to transfer at the speed of thought the way we feel about things.”

⚠️ This is no longer science fiction! In January 2024, Neuralink implanted its first chip in a human patient, who subsequently controlled a computer cursor using thought alone. Right direction, wrong timescale for consumer application. BCI in financial planning is not a 2026 story, but it may be a 2036 one…

Part 2 – What Nobody Saw Coming 

The developments that reshaped financial planning and financial advice in the UK – and the blind spots in the 2019 predictions. 

The Generative AI Revolution 

The 2019 predictions focused on machine learning and data-driven automation. Some people saw generative AI coming. But almost nobody anticipated the speed. From ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 to mainstream professional adoption in under two years – the transition has been unlike anything the technology world has produced before.

Tools that don’t just analyse data but create, converse, reason and explain in natural language. The impact of Large Language Models on financial planning is not incremental. It is structural. 

The economics of advice have shifted permanently. A task that took two hours can now be done in two minutes. According to the Bank of England and FCA’s 2024 survey, 75% of UK financial firms are already using AI – up from 58% in 2022. The profession is no longer debating whether to adopt. It is debating how fast, how safely, and to what end. 

Consumer Duty – Financial Wellbeing Becomes Regulation 

The FCA’s Consumer Duty, implemented in July 2023, has been the most significant regulatory shift in a generation. It moved the profession from process-compliance to outcome-delivery. Everything we do must now demonstrably serve the client’s interests – their financial and personal wellbeing. 

For firms already doing it well, this is not a burden. It is the formal arrival of what good planners have always believed: that the measure of advice is the life it creates, not the document it produces. Measure Wealth by Wellbeing is no longer a philosophy. It is a regulatory direction of travel. 

The UK Advice Gap Gets Worse 

The promise of technology was that it would democratise financial advice. The reality has been more complicated. According to the FCA’s Financial Lives 2024 survey, just 9% of UK adults received regulated financial advice in the previous twelve months. Boring Money estimates over 12 million people with £10,000+ in savings are still getting no advice at all.

St. James’s Place research found 24.6 million people have never accessed any form of guidance – yet among those who have, 84% say they benefitted mentally or emotionally. The gap is not about demand. It is about access. 

“We have talked about closing the advice gap for twenty years. The needle has barely moved. The profession needs to say this out loud.”

The Great Wealth Transfer – Bigger Than the Headline Suggests 

An estimated £5.5 trillion is set to pass from the Baby Boomer generation to younger generations in the UK, according to research by Brooks Macdonald. Over £300 billion will reach around 300,000 beneficiaries in the next decade alone – a figure that already exceeds the total currently managed by adviser firms for UK private clients.

Inheritance tax receipts are rising sharply, with the OBR forecasting more than £50bn collected between 2024 and 2029. The demand for estate planning, intergenerational advice and family wealth conversations has never been greater. 

But the narrative deserves scrutiny – and this is where the profession needs to think carefully. According to HMRC and ONS data, the average age at which someone in the UK receives an inheritance is 61. Not 35. Not 40. The wealth is largely transferring to people already approaching retirement, not the Millennials and Gen Z the headlines focus on.

And the median inheritance for a typical recipient is around £33,000 – significant, but hardly the transformational windfall the term ‘great wealth transfer’ implies for most families. 

What this means in practice is a surge in clients who are simultaneously navigating inheritance, retirement, care costs and estate planning for the first time – often without an existing adviser relationship. This is not just a planning challenge. It is a relationship challenge.

The firms that have deliberately built intergenerational client relationships – that know the children and grandchildren, that have had the family conversations before the wealth moves – will retain it. The firms that haven’t will watch it walk out of the door. 

“The wealth transfer is real. But the opportunity is not in chasing the assets. It is in building the relationships that keep them.”

Longevity Planning in the UK – The Data Nobody Is Talking About 

The population living longer was the opening premise of the 2019 article. What I underestimated was how rapidly longevity would become an investment theme, a planning challenge and a cultural force simultaneously. But the data tells a more complicated story – and it is one the profession urgently needs to understand. 

According to ONS data published in February 2026, life expectancy in the UK has broadly recovered to pre-pandemic levels – 79.1 years for men and 83.0 years for women. But healthy life expectancy – the years spent in genuinely good health – has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 2011.

Men can now expect just 60.7 years of healthy life. Women, 60.9 years. That means men are spending an average of 18 years in poor health. Women, 22.5 years. And the gap between the healthiest and least healthy areas of the UK is widening, not closing. 

This is the longevity paradox. People are living longer – but more of those extra years are being spent in poor health. The planning implications are profound. Drawdown strategies built on average life expectancy tables are already inadequate. Care costs, cognitive decline, purpose and identity in later life, the emotional and financial weight on families – these are not peripheral concerns. They are the central planning challenge of the next decade. 

Longevity planning does not sit outside the financial planner’s remit. It sits at the heart of it. No one else owns that conversation. Your GP does not have the time. Your accountant does not have the philosophy. Your wealth manager does not have the relationship.

The financial plan of the future asks not just how long your money lasts – but how well you live for as long as possible. The planner who can hold that conversation becomes something far more valuable than a technical adviser. It is a direction we have been moving towards at First Wealth. The longevity data makes it urgent for everyone. 

Part 3 – The Next Seven Years: A New Set of Predictions

Eight bold predictions for the future of financial planning and financial advice in the UK. 2026 to 2033. 

In 2019, I made predictions that felt speculative. Several of them were right. Here is the next set, made with the same willingness to be bold, and the same acceptance that some of them will be wrong.

Prediction 01: AI Finally Closes the Advice Gap (If Regulation Allows It)

By 2033, the millions of people who need straightforward, affordable guidance – on ISAs, basic drawdown, standard protection – will finally be served, primarily by AI-powered platforms. The technology exists today. What is missing is the regulatory will to deploy it at scale.

The FCA’s cautious, liability-averse approach to AI-generated advice risks entrenching the very inequality it claims to want to solve. This will happen. The question is whether UK regulation enables it first, or whether it happens in markets less constrained by liability law – and we are left to catch up. 

Prediction 02: Longevity Planning Becomes Part of the Financial Planner’s Remit 

Within seven years, the boundary between financial planning and longevity planning will dissolve. Leading firms will routinely incorporate biological age data – drawn from DNA profiles, wearable devices, lifestyle analytics and family medical history – into cashflow and retirement planning.

The question shifts from ‘how long do I need to plan for?’ to ‘how do we help you live as well as possible for as long as possible?’ That is a fundamentally different conversation – and a fundamentally different value proposition.

The financial plan becomes the foundation. The longevity conversation – covering health, purpose, energy, relationships and financial resilience across a potentially thirty-year retirement – becomes the building on top of it.

The firms that make this shift will not just retain clients for longer. They will become indispensable to them in a way that no investment return, no matter how strong, ever could. 

Prediction 03: Financial Wellbeing Becomes a Measurable Metric 

The profession has talked about financial wellbeing for a decade. By 2033, the best firms will be measuring it – rigorously, consistently and in ways that clients can track over time. At First Wealth, we have been developing Measure Wealth by Wellbeing as our framework for doing exactly this – it is still evolving, and we do not claim to have it perfected.

But the direction is clear: validated frameworks, combined with AI analysis of client behaviour and financial outcomes, will make it possible to quantify whether a client’s financial plan is actually improving their life. The firms that can demonstrate that – with evidence, not assertion – will have the most compelling case for their fees ever articulated. 

Prediction 04: Hyper-Personalisation Replaces the Generic Financial Plan 

The financial plan of 2033 will bear little resemblance to the document we produce today. Rather than a standardised template adjusted at the margins, AI will generate genuinely personalised plans built from real-time data: actual spending, live portfolio values, open banking feeds, health data, stated goals and behavioural profile.

The plan will update continuously, not annually. The client of 2033 will not wait for their annual review to know where they stand. They will know at any moment – and the role of the adviser will be to help them interpret it, act on it and stay the course when emotions tempt them to do otherwise. 

Prediction 05: Measure Wealth by Wellbeing Becomes a Consumer Expectation 

At First Wealth, we have been building our Measure Wealth by Wellbeing philosophy – the idea that the success of a financial plan should be measured not by returns alone but by the quality of life it creates. It is still developing. But we believe it points in the right direction. And within this period, we think that direction becomes mainstream consumer expectation.

Driven by Consumer Duty evolution, by a generation of clients who have lived through financial crisis, pandemic and cost-of-living shock, and by a cultural shift away from wealth accumulation towards life satisfaction, clients will increasingly demand that their adviser can answer a simple question: is your advice making my life better?

The firms that can answer yes – with evidence – will define the next era of the profession. 

Prediction 06: An Anti-AI Premium Emerges at the Top End 

Here is a prediction most people are not making: a premium, explicitly human-only advice tier will emerge among high-net-worth clients within this period. The data already points this way. A 2025 Lloyds Banking Group Consumer Digital Index found that while 56% of UK adults have used AI to help manage their money, 83% worry about data privacy and 80% are concerned about receiving inaccurate information.

A separate FIS/Opinium survey (December 2025) found that 33% of UK consumers have no trust at all in generative AI – a figure virtually unchanged since 2023 – and 50% say it makes them anxious. That is a substantial and persistent trust deficit. Some clients will actively insist on human-only advice as a mark of exclusivity and data security (and will pay more for it).

The firms that build this as a deliberate proposition will own one of the most defensible and highest-margin segments in the market. The anti-AI premium is not a niche curiosity. It is a pricing opportunity hiding in plain sight. 

Prediction 07: Predictive Life Planning – AI Models the Shape of Your Life, Not Just Your Finances 

The most profound shift in the next seven years will not be in how we manage money. It will be in what financial planning actually is.

By 2033, leading firms will deploy AI that cross-references personal financial data, population health statistics, economic forecasts and real-time behavioural signals – including daily journalling and emotional check-ins – to create a digital twin of each client’s financial life. Not a static document reviewed once a year, but a living, continuously updated model of who they are, what they have, and where they are heading.  

The system will flag decisions the client has not yet thought to ask about. It will notice when spending patterns suggest stress before the client has mentioned it. It will connect a change in sleep or exercise data to a conversation about retirement timing. The financial plan becomes a continuous, living relationship between the client, their data and their adviser – with the human there to interpret, guide and hold the line when it matters most.

This is not science fiction. The component parts exist today. Someone will assemble them. And when they do, it will redefine what financial planning means entirely. 

Prediction 08: Profit Holds But Margin Compresses 

Fee compression is coming, and rightly so. As AI drives down the cost of delivering advice, clients should benefit from that efficiency. The important distinction: firms will maintain profit, but not profit margin. Scale offsets compression – the ability to serve a significantly larger market compensates for the squeeze on individual fees. The firms building for fifteen years are already thinking about this.

Those building for five may not feel the pressure until it is too late. The portfolio is the commodity. The relationship is the product. Price accordingly. 

Part 4 – Three Things the Profession Needs to Say Out Loud

Three uncomfortable truths that the profession has been avoiding for too long.

Truth One: The Industry Has Profited From the Complexity It Claims to Be Solving 

This is the difficult one. Financial services – and financial planning within it – has, for decades, benefited from opacity. Complex products, layered charging structures, jargon-heavy documentation and a regulatory framework that requires professional intermediaries to navigate it: these are not accidents.

They are, in part, the architecture of an industry that has had a commercial interest in being hard to understand. 

Technology is stripping that away. AI can explain a pension drawdown strategy in plain English in seconds. Open Banking can show a client their complete financial picture in a single view. Automated platforms can construct and manage a diversified portfolio for a fraction of the cost of active management.

As complexity is commoditised, the value of complexity as a business model evaporates. 

The firms that will thrive are those that have already stopped selling complexity and started selling clarity. The firms that haven’t – that still charge for the navigation of a system they have quietly helped to make difficult – face a reckoning. 

“The value of complexity as a business model is evaporating. Clarity is the new competitive advantage.”

Truth Two: We Have Talked About the Advice Gap for Twenty Years and Done Almost Nothing 

The advice gap – the millions of people in the UK who need financial guidance and cannot access or afford it – has been a fixture of profession conferences, FCA consultations and trade press for two decades. The discussion has been thoughtful, well-intentioned and almost entirely ineffective. The numbers have barely moved. 

The number of regulated financial advisers in the UK has fallen, not risen, over the past ten years. The minimum investable assets required to access a full financial planning service has increased at most firms.

The regulatory cost of giving advice has driven consolidation towards the affluent end of the market. Young people, those on modest incomes, those facing complex decisions about debt or housing or employment – these people are largely unserved. 

Technology can change this. AI-powered, regulated advice at scale is technically achievable today. What has been missing is the will – regulatory, commercial and professional – to build it. The profession – ourselves included – needs to treat the advice gap as its most important unsolved challenge, not a problem for someone else to fix. 

Truth Three: FOMO Is Driving Firms Towards Decisions They Haven’t Thought Through 

Go on LinkedIn right now and it is relentless. Here is a prompt for this. Here is an automation for that. Here is how AI transformed someone’s practice overnight.

And there is a real danger that sucks firms in. They start deploying AI with clients because they feel their competitors are getting ahead and they cannot afford to be left behind. But they have not asked the basic questions. Where is the data going? What are the liability implications? What does the FCA expect? What happens when it goes wrong? 

The FOMO is real. But the risk of moving fast and getting it wrong is far greater than the risk of being thoughtful and getting it right. The firms that rush because of LinkedIn will be the cautionary tales. The firms that move deliberately will be the case studies. 

There are two very different AI futures in financial services. In one, AI is deployed thoughtfully – removing genuine friction, improving accuracy, freeing human attention for relationship work. In the other, AI is deployed as cost-cutting cover – automating broken processes, scaling inconsistency, and dressing up a worse service as innovation.

Some of the largest pension providers in the UK already have turnaround times of four to six weeks, returning wrong and inconsistent answers while clients wait and adviser firms haemorrhage hours of wasted time. AI will not fix that if the underlying intent is to protect margins rather than improve outcomes. 

“Good AI removes bad process. Bad AI just automates it faster.”

Consumer Duty was designed to change that calculus. But only if the FCA enforces it with conviction. 

Part 5 – The Adviser of 2033

What the best financial planners and financial advisers in the UK will look like – and what it takes to become one. 

If forced to describe the adviser of 2033 in two words, I would say: Coach and Specialist. 

The coach is the human constant. As AI absorbs the technical, data-driven work that has always been a means rather than an end, the adviser’s value concentrates in the relationship – in knowing when to speak and when simply to be present. A great financial adviser is also, in effect, a humanised prompt engineer: knowing which questions to ask, in what order, with what emotional intelligence, to surface what a client actually needs. Ask the wrong questions and the most powerful AI in the world produces a dangerously confident wrong answer. 

The specialist is the commercial response to automation. As generalist advice is commoditised – as AI handles the straightforward, the standard and the scalable – the advisers who thrive will be those who do something specific exceptionally well. Whether that is advising business owners through exit, supporting clients through complex estate structuring, or building genuinely personalised plans for people navigating a thirty-year retirement: specialism is the moat. 

“The adviser of 2033 is a coach who happens to be a specialist. The technical knowledge is still there – but it is no longer the product.”

One important caveat: the human connection differentiator has a generational half-life. Future clients may seek touchpoints rather than ongoing relationships. The answer is not less humanity – it is better humanity, measurable and deliberate. What the adviser of 2033 is not: a generalist producing standardised plans at scale. That role is being automated. 

The best news is that the advisers who entered this profession because they genuinely wanted to help people live better lives are exactly who the future needs. The craft is not disappearing. It is being liberated from the administrative scaffolding that has always obscured it. 

Final Thoughts – A Conversation Worth Having 

Seven years ago, I ended this article with a call not to be fearful of change. Seven years on, with AI reshaping financial planning, longevity redefining retirement, and financial wellbeing becoming central to what great advice looks like in the UK – I will do the same today. But with more urgency. 

The rate of change in our profession is not slowing. AI, longevity, regulatory evolution and changing client expectations are converging simultaneously. The firms that get ahead of these forces – that build the technology, develop the coaching culture, embrace transparency and commit to serving people who currently cannot access advice – will define what financial planning looks like for the next generation. 

At First Wealth, we have built our business around a simple conviction: that wealth should be measured by the quality of life it creates. We do not claim to have all the answers. But we are thinking hard about the questions – and we think every firm in this profession should be doing the same.  

So here is what I would ask you to consider: 

Do you agree with these predictions? Think I have missed something? The firms still debating whether AI matters, whether longevity planning is their job, or whether the advice gap is someone else’s problem – those conversations need to happen now. I would genuinely welcome your thoughts. The profession gets better when we think out loud together. 

– AJ Villis, First Wealth, 2026 

Sources & References 

The Economist – ‘Masters of the Universe’, October 2019. Computer-run equity strategies and the rise of passive investing. 

Bank of England & Financial Conduct Authority – AI in UK Financial Services Survey, 2024. AI adoption rates among regulated firms. 

Financial Conduct Authority – Financial Lives Survey, 2024. Regulated advice take-up among UK adults. 

Boring Money – Consumer Research, 2024. Estimate of UK adults with £10,000+ in savings receiving no financial advice. 

St. James’s Place / Opinium – Real Life Advice Report, 2024–2025. UK adults who have never accessed financial advice or guidance; proportion reporting mental and emotional benefit from advice. 

Office for National Statistics – National Life Tables, UK: 2022 to 2024. Published December 2025. UK life expectancy at birth by sex. 

Office for National Statistics – Healthy Life Expectancy, UK: 2011 to 2013 and 2022 to 2024. Published February 2026. Healthy life expectancy and years spent in good health by sex. 

Brooks Macdonald – The Great Wealth Transfer: A Financial Shift. Estimate of £5.5 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer in the UK; beneficiary data. 

Office for Budget Responsibility – Fiscal Outlook, 2024. IHT receipts forecast 2024–25 to 2028–29. 

HMRC & Office for National Statistics – Inheritance and Estates Data. Average age of inheritance receipt and median inheritance value in the UK. 

Lloyds Banking Group – Consumer Digital Index, 2025. UK adult AI usage for personal finance; data privacy and accuracy concerns. 

FIS / Opinium – UK Consumer Pulse Survey, December 2025. Consumer trust in generative AI in financial services. 

This document is marketing material for a retail audience and does not constitute advice or recommendations. Past performance is not a guide to future performance and may not be repeated. The value of investments and the income from them may go down as well as up and investors may not get back the amount originally invested.