Gemma Livermore: Welcome to another episode of Seismic Sessions, where we explore the shifts shaping the financial services industry. I’m Gemma Livermore, Head of International FS Marketing at Seismic.
Rachael Rowe: And I’m Rachael Rowe, our VP at Seismic. And today we’re discussing one of the most significant changes the wealth management industry will face in the coming years, the Great Wealth Transfer. This transfer is expected to see 84 trillion dollars of assets passed down by baby boomers and the silent generation by 2045. With 72 trillion dollars going directly to heirs. The transfer
Gemma Livermore: The transfer of wealth from baby boomers alone will account for 53 53 trillion, that’s 63 percent of all transfers, while the silent generation will hand down 15 trillion. is Nitika Vyas, co founder of Aila Money. Hi Nitika!
Nitika Vyas: Hi Hiya
Gemma Livermore: And we also have Jonathan Tweedy, Managing Director and Head of Distribution at RBC Brew Dolphin. Hello!
Jonathan Tweedie: Hey, how you doing?
Rachael Rowe: Delighted to have you both join us today. For our regular listeners, you will be familiar with our, Seismic format.
So we will talk about the tremors of the topic that we’re going to be looking at, where things first began, and then we’ll move to the epicentre, which is pretty much where we are. Today, and then we’ll look forward and consider the aftershocks on what the future looks like. And in this episode, we’ll explore how wealth managers need to adapt their strategies to serve a broader, more diverse client base, spanning multiple generations. And we’ll also dive into how analytics can help wealth managers track their success as they implement these changes. So let’s begin by looking at how wealth management has evolved and as is usual for our podcasts. Our first question to each of our guests. What does enabling financial services mean to you? And if I could begin with you, Jonathan.
Jonathan Tweedie: I think it’s really simple. Um, You have to be hugely expansive. It fundamentally means you’ve got to give access to the population. And it’s, think of it a bit like an NHS. Everybody has to have a way of getting hold of information and the advice they require.
Rachael Rowe: Brilliant. I love that analogy. And, and Nitika, what, what does it mean for you?
Nitika Vyas: I have to actually echo what Jonathan has said. And I think enabling financial services to me means making it accessible for all.
Gemma Livermore: Love that. So, let’s get this conversation started and for our listeners who may not understand where it all began and why there’s been these tremors of changes, perhaps I could ask you both to paint the picture of how things used to be in wealth management in a pre digitised world. And Jonathan, if we can start with yourself.
Jonathan Tweedie: So well, I joined the industry in 2001 and it was still a fairly exclusive club focused on a small number of wealthy individuals and families within Britain, and very much based on a personal relationship developed over many years. And I always term relationships and trust, but you had to be in the club to get into it.
And that’s one of the challenges that I know we’re going to go on to discuss is how do we open that club
Nitika Vyas: Yes. And I, I think I peered in and so my background has been 15 years in what is traditional finance, investment banking and hedge funds. And it was only actually there that I got to see just how much of a club there is and how much information the wealthy have to continue building their wealth. And for me, that has been such a thing.
I do agree. It has been a club. So traditional wealth management has been as such where. It is only avAilable to people if they have previously it was 250k now half a million plus to be able to actually have a wealth manager help you and support you. And that’s those numbers in terms of, assets avAilable to be managed, not even your whole net worth.
Jonathan Tweedie: Yeah, absolutely. So, we often talk about the fact that the industry is built for the one percentres. and those numbers entirely reflect that. But if we’re going to meet our ambitions and if we’re actually going to be relevant to society going forward, you got to work out how the 1 percent becomes a 99%.
And that doesn’t mean everybody gets the same service because commercially that’s just not viable. But it does mean everybody has that access and that information from trusted sources. Thank you.
Rachael Rowe: And picking up on that, you know, you’ve, you’ve both talked about this concept of a club and how traditional wealth management used to look. What challenges did wealth managers face in that traditional setup? and I guess how then did that shape the industry as it was?
Jonathan Tweedie: It’s really interesting. So I think the biggest challenge they had was Servicing your client base was very expensive because it was all about time and quality in the relationship you have with somebody. So you invested a lot of your time and energy of deepening your relationship with your clients, which is clearly important, but it’s very hard to think about how you service an ever greater proportion of the. if it’s simply about depth of relationship to build trust.
And think a lot of clients traditionally, just assumed that the, the expertise was always there. And again, potentially that was a mistake, because sometimes that trust was built on relationship rather than actual value and expertise that you brought to it. But the biggest challenge was the simple cost of delivering it and regulation. never helped us solve that problem because it narrowed the focus of where we’re going and how we build trust and how we service our communities.
Nitika Vyas: And that’s especially been the case in the last 10 years, which has actually made the amount of financial advisors reduce even further and want to retire, in fact, for a lot of them. I think there was a stat to say 50 percent of financial advisors wanted to retire in the next 10 years.
Jonathan Tweedie: And, and look at who the financial advisors are. I mean, they’re me, they’re, traditionally middle middle aged white men
Nitika Vyas: You said it, not me.
Gemma Livermore: if you But, but yeah, again, if you think about reflecting the community you operate in and the community of wealth generators in Britain, that might’ve been true in Edwardian Britain.
And that’s the point, isn’t it? You know, it was all aligned to build trust with somebody, you have to align with them and connect with them. And if you don’t have a host of wealth managers that connect with a diverse range of people, you’re never going to reach that diverse range of people.
Jonathan Tweedie: Of people. It’s about community, isn’t it?
If you’re building trust, you build it in communities and you represent the community you’re building trust with it. And the industry has traditionally. being really bad at diversity is only something that people have properly considered for the last 10 years, and even then, not with the energy and passion they need to, in order to make the changes we require.
Nitika Vyas: Agreed. And when you say diversity, you know, that comes in a lot of forms, but just even the simplest of females versus males, which I would say, you know, half the population is female. So, and that’s been the same for a long time. So we’re not even looking at different types of diversity. 16 percent of financial advisors are female at the moment.
Gemma Livermore: Which is crazy statistic, isn’t it? Considering that you’re reaching half the half the population.
Nitika Vyas: And only 16%, and you know, we can talk about wanting to feel like you can relate to someone, but this is just even a gender thing rather than other diversity, and it goes back to that club mentality, doesn’t it? It’s, I know from myself working in finance for many years, that even at the beginning of my career, I felt like that. There were silos of women in finance, and I was often one of very few women in events or offices. and so naturally it didn’t attract the women to the industry. Whereas I think there is a big shift nowadays. There are a lot more women wanting to be in finance and wealth management.
Jonathan Tweedie: And actually, I think the problem’s even worse than you suggest because 16 to 50 percent is bad. Actually, our end clients are nearly always women. Because, because life expectancy is longer. So actually, when you talk about wealth transfer, often the first wealth transfer is spouse to spouse. And that means that your end client is nearly statistically, nearly always female.
Nitika Vyas: And one of the interesting parts there is actually, we’ve read papers and there’s been studies done that the traditional wealth management route of maybe focusing on the man more than the woman, when the woman then inherits the money more often than not, in the first year, they take that money from that wealth manager, because they They’ve not had that relationship that wealth managers only ever spoken to the, their husband so they take the money out of them because they don’t trust them. And I don’t know how, how you feel about that, or if you’ve seen that
Jonathan Tweedie: Yeah, no, I, I think one of the things we try and focus a lot on is, is avoiding that stereotype of talking to a man and worse than that, actually talking to anybody as if you’re the smartest person in the room. our job is always to make the complex simple. It’s to deliver a complex subject in a way that people understand, and they relate to, and they trust. And I’ll keep using the word trust because I think it’s so fundamental to our industry . If we don’t build relationships around that, and if we try and add value by just pretending how smart we are, you alienate people. And I think one of the biggest problems, and you just articulated much better than I just have, is at transfer points, you are often going to somebody who’s looking at you from an external point of view and going, I don’t see any reason to trust you. I don’t relate to you. I don’t understand what you’re talking about. And I haven’t had long term relationship with you. You see it first transfer on, on first death. you see it even more so on second transfer as you’re then moving wealth down generations because you’ve got to be relevant to the generation. And we talk about next gen a lot. But next gen it’s not, kids on skateboards. next generation is in their
Rachael Rowe: Yes. Well, millennials are mid forties now. So when we look at the pre digital era, how did the industry service those clients? And I’m thinking particularly about the baby boomers, the silent generation. What were the real kind of main challenges that existed around that?
Jonathan Tweedie: So, I think, the biggest challenge, and come back to that club analogy, it was taking people on the journey of where the club had to go to. So when I first joined, the industry is built around, advice and then you paid for advice through transactions. There’s no ongoing contingent liability. it’s much more of a stockbroking industry, which made it a very exclusive private members club rather than a genuine wealth management. Because most people didn’t require wealth management. The complexities of individual finances over the last 30 years have changed dramatically. The state no longer provides. The corporate is unlikely to provide. My parents generation would have worked for one company most of their lives. and would have had a pension provided by that company and didn’t need to think my children, their average time in any one corporate is probably a couple of years. They’re going to try and work in many multiple industries and they’ve got to move their finances with them all the time And they’ll be accountable.
Nitika Vyas: And it’s not only just moving jobs. Now people have portfolio careers. People are looking to get income from multiple sources. And often that means you have to manage your own finances in a way that’s very different because you’re part time in a lot of places. And so you don’t have a fixed employer that you’re necessarily always turning to for all of it.
Jonathan Tweedie: And I completely agree. and again, if you make the complexity of what you require ever more difficult, but you restrict the number of people you want to serve. As an industry, you have to challenge whether you’re failing to meet the needs of your consumer. And I would come from the point of view that at the moment as an industry. we are definitely failing to meet the needs of our future consumer. Would
Nitika Vyas: Would you also say the traditional old finance view was almost very cookie cutter because everyone had a very similar life. There was a view of, this is what you did, you, you have a job, you have 2. 5 children, you then want holidays, you want to help your children a little bit, and then you want to retire. And that was almost the template that a wealth manager had to stick to.
Jonathan Tweedie: Yeah, and smart companies such as yours are looking at it and saying, Oh, it’s not about that. It’s about understanding what your ambition is, where you want to be and providing the coaching, the nurturing and the development to get you there. And we shouldn’t measure you against. random benchmarks that someone makes up. We should measure it against what are you trying to achieve? Are you on track to get there or are you behind it? And how do we get you back on track? So a meeting with your advisor Is much more valuable when rather than talking about what they’ve done and how clever they are, they talk about what you need and whether you’re on track to deliver for what you aspire to and whether your ambitions have changed.
Gemma Livermore: So let’s move on to the epicentre and I like this bit because it really talks about where we are now and where those tremors of change have got us to.
Okay. Let’s have a look how technology has really changed how wealth advisors can engage with clients from baby boomers to younger generations and Nitika, if we can come to you first on this one, I know that you’ve embraced a lot of digital tools to reach a broader audience.
Perhaps you can start talking about how that digitalisation has changed the way wealth management services are being delivered.
Nitika Vyas: Yes. So I am super excited about the digitalisation of wealth management because I truly believe that this is actually going to help make it more accessible to everyone. Like Jonathan said, initially it was a 1 percent club. I’ve never been a part of that 1 percent club, which is why I’ve then helped set up Aila Money and I’m the co founder. We are wanting to make the wealth management accessible to all and actually close the gender wealth gap by being a personal trainer for your finances, aimed at really helping people achieve their life goals. and one of the key elements is technology, whether that’s your data, your open banking, open finance data, or AI has really catalysed the way that we can actually help people. And there are so many ways, and I think some of them include the fact that it’s convenient and accessible.
You can have a solution that is now avAilable 24 seven. I think what we’ve said previously is the wealth management space was a very face to face relationship between an advisor a person.
We are getting into a world where people want things instantly. They want things straight away and the technology allows you to be able to deliver that message. Also, the way that the messages are delivered, so that face to face. People actually,
Gemma Livermore: They want self serve a lot more now, don’t they, before they make that decision.
Nitika Vyas: Yeah, they want it instantly. they want that in bite sized chunks rather than an hour meeting. also personalisation and automation, I think has been a huge part and AI has paid a huge space in this.
Like we said, personalising it to your life goals, rather than giving you a view of everything. People want everything to be personalised now. They want to make sure it’s accessible to them and actually have it so that it is their numbers, their views,
Gemma Livermore: So that personalisation becomes inclusive, so it allows them to feel part of that club, we saw a lot of that over COVID, didn’t we? And I think that opened up a lot for us in terms of DE and I as well. and I know that Nitika, we’ve spoken a lot before about how you can reach. a diverse set of wealth in smaller amounts, but over a larger number of people. So you’re still dealing with the same amount of wealth overall. And that’s an area that has previously been untapped because there have been these door entry numbers that you have to have in order to get a wealth manager. And I think it’s really important now just before the wealth transfer, we start using the digital side to reach those people.
Nitika Vyas: And I think a few of the things that really helped in this space is the neo banks and also the robo advisory Which don’t get me wrong jonathan It’s not the same as having a wealth manager and I do want to highlight that they don’t give you the same level of service but not everyone can get that same level of service that Jonathan provides. It is just making sure that there is a service that’s available to people.
Jonathan Tweedie: And I think you’re absolutely right. wealth and wealth creation is always a journey. And actually, brands and we are, we have a saying, you want to create the environment where you are relevant and of value as early in that wealth journey as possible, because that builds trust. And the industry needs to recognise that you need to be relevant and valuable to somebody in their 20s, in the same way you are when they’re in their 40s, because otherwise, when you watch wealth transfer happen, turning up and going, we’ve always been your best friend and here to help but you’re new to us is, is really difficult.
Nitika Vyas: And that’s exactly why we’ve set up Aila Money, because it is the fact that we truly believe people should be looking at their money and getting help with their money, From the early twenties because of compounding, that’s when you’re actually going to allow your money to grow and keeping that focus on it from an early age really helps.
And actually that doesn’t look like necessarily having that complex situation where you need a financial advisor, but able to have someone give you the information, the education, because financial literacy In the UK and across the world is horrifically low. So having the financial literacy as well as support and financial coaching along the way, we think is really important.
Jonathan Tweedie: So I suppose the challenge is that I, I entirely agree with you and I absolutely believe we’ve got to create the environment where it’s not about educating, it’s about sharing with people, sharing information, sharing knowledge, allowing people to make decisions. The challenge is everyone’s tried to do it. So yeah, nutmeg were probably first movers in that space and they couldn’t digitise it. sense of advice, because people want someone to hold their hat. Even the mighty Vanguard came in, spent, what, 18 months in the market and went, it doesn’t work, and pulled back out of the advice space. We have to find smarter and cleverer ways to, to employ technology to create trust. And this is where, and we were talking about this beforehand, it allows you to come onto that creating communities and building trust within the communities and the power of crowds. if we can get to the stage where. people understand the impact of advice and think about it by rating people online to go, do I trust somebody that they’re sharing it and I share that with my community and it becomes real, then we can get to the stage where you don’t necessarily, at every stage of your wealth journey need to interact with somebody. You don’t necessarily need advice. You need coaching, support, mentoring to allow you to make the right decisions early on to build a wealth journey all the way through your, your life. So as it gets more complex, you may need more advice, but you should be able to dip in and dip out as well.
Nitika Vyas: And that’s exactly what we are trying to do. So Aila Money is the personal trainer for your finances. We only provide guidance and we do recognise there will be times in people’s financial journey where they do need advice.
However, there’s two big problems. One is the fact that a lot of people, don’t even know that they need advice. Don’t know the value of a mortgage broker or an investment broker, and actually don’t think it’s accessible for them. And then two, people don’t know where to turn to, which is why we then have a marketplace.
So we can then put you in touch with the right advisors who are vetted, who from our community have seen it. Because there is an element of so many people don’t feel One, that they don’t even know they need advice, and two, definitely don’t think that they are worthy of that advice, and that is a big part.
Rachael Rowe: And I, I think as well, if we, look at the challenges faced by the more traditional wealth advisors, I mean, Jonathan, considering RBC and how digitalisation has changed the way that you interact with your clients, what does that look like? How are you using technology to enable that?
Jonathan Tweedie: So, in a, multifaceted number of ways, I think the most important way we’re trying to engage is by building those communities. and we’re trying to think about how to do it on a mass scale so one of the most obvious things we’ve done is we’ve created what we think of as a financial well being proposition. So you can arrive in an organisation and go, your staff are constantly stressed by having to make financial decisions and not knowing where to turn to for advice.
Part of your employee benefits package should be providing them that financial well being care that they require. And we will provide you with both the content and the specialist to turn up and talk them through. So the understanding of why they need to think, why they are actually worthy of needing advice and why they can get access to it through a trusted brand. And if we can persuade employers to subsidize some of that initial cost, because it adds value to the organisation because it gives your employees better chances of making better decisions. better decisions and getting better outcomes and therefore being happier, more productive employees, then that’s a massive win, not just for the organisation we’re supporting, but all of its employees and their families as well. And that way you can build scale into, into what we’re trying to do.
Gemma Livermore: And I think something that’s quite important to mention here is we’ve talked a lot about what needs to change, but there’s a lot that’s been highly successful in the wealth management industry and creating that sense of trust in those one to one relationships has been highly successful, but how do you track that you’re still keeping those relationships in place? Valuable when you’re turning into digital. Yeah,
Jonathan Tweedie: Yeah, and I think that’s a really good question, because we, we already have a digital proposition. Um, as you, engage more people on the digital platforms, monitoring and assessing constant client feedback, looking at your net promoter scores you are providing the MI to make sure you’re getting it right. I still think, as an industry, we are our biggest challenge is creating that trust, and I, I say that because I’ve been working in this industry since 2001, and I can’t count the number of times as an industry, we’ve let down our consumers, that we have behaved in a fashion, which doesn’t build trust because we didn’t put our clients at the centre of our thinking. We put the corporate and profitability at the centre of our thinking. And the banking crisis of 2008 is just one example, But they are almost a constant that you’ll pick up the paper in the morning, and you’ll read again and go, how did that happen? How have we let people down? Because every time it happens, it doesn’t just affect the firm that’s slashed all over the newspapers or all over the news or all over the internet, it affects trust in the entire
Gemma Livermore: It does, yeah.
Nitika Vyas: And, and I think that’s the thing. So the people who are now looking at getting the, money, the Gen Zs, the Millennials, they’ve grown up in this environment where they remember 2008.
They remember some of these crises even SBB recently, and that’s what they know of the banking industry. Maybe the boomers had a little bit more trust in it, but I think I remember reading something over the last few days where, um, gen Z’s were at school in 2008 and they remember the impact of that on their parents and what it meant to their family life. And that’s the view they have of traditional banking. So you’re very right. It is a trust thing because they’ve known that we can’t trust banking since, they were born. Five, six, and you know, your habits and your relationship with money. And also a lot of your psychology is set by the time you’re seven.
So this is what they’ve grown up knowing. So it’s really hard to build that trust again.
Jonathan Tweedie: And then we saw, if you think 2008 afterwards, you actually saw that breaking of trust with the banks, consumers turning to other sectors in the industry, and I don’t want to name any names, on this podcast, but we then saw that next sector just let them down as badly and you saw publicity about sort of people being given silver cufflinks for how many sales they made in a week. You weren’t thinking about your clients. You were thinking about how much money you were making, rather than have your client at the centre of your thinking., To get this right and to get to rebuild trust. Everybody in the industry has to commit to getting our clients are the centre of what we do. We’re all commercial about it. We’re not suggesting for one moment that we can stop being commercial about it.
But if you don’t start with the client, if you start with anything else, you’re making the wrong decisions.
Gemma Livermore: And that’s where consumer duty really helps
Jonathan Tweedie: It does, but you regulating it. narrows the field rather than expands the field.
Rachael Rowe: So I just want to dig into this whole concept of trust and client centricity as we move to the aftershocks. So if we look to the future, the great wealth transfer, as we’ve said, is going to have a profound the wealth management industry. to you first, how how will wealth managers need to adjust their approach to marketing and engagement? And I’m thinking, as I mentioned, terms of trust, client centricity, what,
Jonathan Tweedie: Be involved earlier. So, join the journey at the beginning, be relevant. from an early stage. You’re actually watching a lot of the big high street banks try and do it already.
They’re producing and again, I’m not sure we’re doing it with the right motives, but they’re engaging very early on in education to try and position themselves as a trusted brand in the marketplace. the wealth industry has to do the same. It has to, make sure that it is relevant and engaging early on
Gemma Livermore: How early do you think is the right stage to start?
Jonathan Tweedie: So one of the greatest gifts our government has ever given us as a junior ISA, explaining to grandparents, actually transferring wealth. down two generations into a junior ISA is an incredible way of setting your children’s children up for success. That’s legacy for you. That should really matter to people. we’ve got to do more to make that relevant and then use the communities we build in those. pools of junior writers to become education tools to enable people to have access to content, trusted content about. what’s going on in the world, and hopefully to share their own ideas within that community as well. Because again, it all builds trust, and we use the power of crowds to then enforce that trust and allow more people to engage with it. Which is, so yeah, juniorizers, I would say, are the most important thing to enable us to start thinking about that early.
Nitika Vyas: And I totally echo that. And I think it’s about letting people know what a juniorizer is, and the fact that it’s not just the parents that have to contribute is such a big part Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Rachael Rowe: And clearly, this is a big step from in person interactions of old to much more of a digital first engagement. What kind of challenges do you see advisors facing making that transition themselves?
Jonathan Tweedie: So, let me answer that from the advisor point of view, because I, I think there is a really interesting debate about the coaching point of view and how that actually helps with that journey as we go. So the challenge from the advisor point of view is, unfortunately regulation makes advice difficult. Thanks. very difficult because you are, you are liable and contingent for that advice for the ongoing and indefinite future. if you’re talking about a junior ISA when someone’s born, that’s theoretically to advise, almost impossible understanding how how their journey will evolve and what’s going to happen becomes very difficult to be engaged as an advisor. It’s such a logical argument to transfer wealth that it’s very easy until the point of 18 to go, that’s exactly the right thing to do, but then how do you provide that coaching, that mentoring, that, help and relevance to make decisions? not just about your savings, but about access to, mortgages, access to credit, a lot of that was traditionally done by banks who didn’t think about what was in the best interest of the consumer. They thought about what was in the best interest of the bank and then they sold the products of the bank into that consumer. I think the industry is going to evolve to be the champion of a consumer. I think in order to do that, we are going to have to have some pretty grown up conversations with the regulator, talking about the difference between advice and coaching and allowing them to come on the journey with us to be advice light because we want to move from 1 percent to 99%.
Nitika Vyas: The good thing is, I think the FCA is already looking at this and they’ve already published papers on guidance versus advice. Now, I think there is still a long way to go, but they are trying and they are recognising that guidance is really important. I think, um, What you said from an advisor point of view is really important, but I think for people, the other side of it is what they’re looking from for an advisor is far more holistic now than it’s ever been in the past.
They aren’t just looking for an advisor to take their money and look after it. They want to have a real relationship with the advisor, where the advisor provides emotional support. the financial education, the financial challenge, but is also. All rounded and is able to give you everything, which is really hard to look for from one person.
Jonathan Tweedie: Oh, no, I didn’t tell you. And actually, I think there’s another thing where, Miss Yadner, they also want to understand the impact of their money on society. Which, yeah, again, if I think when I joined, that, no one really thought this through, but actually I talked to my children today about what’s happening and they’re very clear about where they want their money working and the impact they want it to have, and that’s a, societal change which we have to reflect within the industry.
Gemma Livermore: And not even just generationally, like women make decisions much more with emotion. And we’re going to see much more wealth in women’s hands than ever before in the first part of this wealth transfer. So that point, Nitika, I’d like to ask you, what role do you think factors like ESG will play in shaping that next wealth generation?
Nitika Vyas: So to touch on a point you’ve made about women having more wealth. So actually if women did feel confident and comfortable investing at the same rate as men did, there’d be an extra 3.2 trillion in the
Gemma Livermore: Wow. I mean, that’s a reason in itself for our listeners to start marketing to women.
Nitika Vyas: that in itself is crazy. but actually what’s even more exciting about that is more than half of that would go to ethical investing and ESG investing. So there is actually. A moment where the industry has to acknowledge whether it’s women or whether it’s diversity in other ways, or millennials and Gen Z.
They are looking for very different things when they come to investing. They’re looking at ESG scores. They’re looking at how they can make their investments make real impact in the world. And I think that’s, really, really important.
Gemma Livermore: We’ve noticed that a lot at Seismic, a lot of our asset management clients use Seismic to showcase their ESG assets, which is a new movement. And that’s really interesting to see that people are genuinely wanting to know where it is going to be invested And where it is going.
Rachael Rowe: And I think what we’ve been discussing this morning throws up challenges in terms of understanding how you’re delivering the right. information at the right time through the right channels at scale, because if you look from an organisational perspective, it’s been able to do this compliantly, consistently and at scale.
How are you tackling that at the moment, jonathan?
Jonathan Tweedie: Uh by investing heavily in in trying to create those platforms where we can access at scale the marketplace. so I, I would come back to, I think the biggest change we will make in the next few years is rolling financial well being into more organisations so that they’re able to support their staff and we’re then able to provide that information into a community that allows people to make better decisions and to be relevant to them. So it’s, you don’t want to just turn up and talk about how to fund an ISA, how to save into your pension. That’s all information they require, but you’ve also got to be credible in talking about, well, what’s the right decisions about the level of debt you should have within your household budget.
How do you just make rudimentary budgetary decisions so that you understand what element you’re saving and where it’s saving, what the impact of those savings are going to have on you in the future. The value of time and money is something people often misunderstand. Compounding being the seventh wonder of the world, it’s the eighth wonder of the world. What am
Rachael Rowe: world. Yes. .
Jonathan Tweedie: it’s true. But a lot of people don’t understand the impact of compounding and they really don’t understand the value of a number. because numbers sound big on a day and then you understand what that requires for the future. So one of the areas we’ve, been able to specialise in is providing help in divorce cases. Because often somebody hears a number and goes, oh, I’m gonna be fine. And then they realise that actually that number isn’t anything like big enough to support the lifestyle they used to. And we can help them think about the impact, understand the decisions they’re making. But again, you don’t want to be involved. at the end of that relationship. You have to be involved in the beginning of it, because you have to be able to share the information so someone’s making an informed decision, which means you’re working pro bono to build trust.
Rachael Rowe: To build a trust, exactly. We come back to trust again. It’s a constant theme, I think, throughout this conversation.
Gemma Livermore: I could go on about this conversation a lot longer, but we are on time constraints for our listeners, So before we wrap up, I’d really like to ask you both, what one piece of advice would you give wealth managers as they prepare for this massive shift? you know, they’re heading into increasing complexity, serving multiple generations.
What would be your, takeaway from today’s? podcast? And Nitika, if I can go to you first.
Nitika Vyas: I think it’s about making sure it’s personalised to the consumer. It might be hard to do, but recognise that each person is their own individual. They have their own different life goals and you have to cater to that. So it’s about finding the right products for them, but also recognizing that not everyone is on that cookie cutter journey, of a lifespan.
Jonathan Tweedie: Yeah, so I would entirely agree with that.
The thing I’d tell wealth managers, though is check your own moral compass. Values are something that you actually should live by, not sell by.
Rachael Rowe: Excellent. And thank you both for joining us today. It’s been a fascinating conversation about the great wealth transfer and I think something that we’ll be talking about for quite a while to come. So thank you for joining us.
Nitika Vyas: Thanks for having us
Jonathan Tweedie: Thank you. It’s been really great fun.
