Digging a large hole with a shovel is time-consuming manual labour. More people and more shovels may speed up the process and increase the number of holes but it’s still strenuous work that’s difficult to scale.
Real progress requires earthmoving machinery and additional skills.
The takeout for the advice profession is that it can’t solve the advice demand and supply imbalance with more shovels.
The task of educating and guiding 22 million adult Australians and their families to financial freedom requires new equipment and a different way of doing things, backed by supportive regulation, to achieve stepped change.
That’s not to say that the work being done inside practices to drive continuous improvement and train and mentor the next generation of advisers isn’t valuable. It’s incredibly valuable and important, and must continue, but it’s just not going to move the dial when it comes to closing the advice gap.
A golden era
In the future, the financial services industry will look back on this time as the golden age of advice. After decades of trying to articulate and promote the value of advice, people finally get it. Not only do they get it, they want it.
However, the profession hasn’t adequately invested in supply, including people, systems and technology, ahead of growth. While there have been extenuating circumstances including unprecedented regulatory and structural change, fragmentation and higher than average attrition rates, Australians are now at increasing risk of getting poor advice from unqualified providers because professional advisers don’t have the capacity to help them or can’t help them at their price point.
When it comes to supply, the people challenge will take time to solve. It requires training and mentoring talent, education reform, and attracting graduates by positioning financial planning as an attractive career.
But the systems and technology challenge can be tackled now, provided Australia’s largest and most experienced groups are prepared to lead.
Advisers are crying out for solutions that will free them the operational aspects of delivering advice so they can spend more time interacting with clients and customising strategies to meet their needs. The profession also needs technology that can facilitate the delivery of digital advice at scale, and enable people to move along the advice continuum as their circumstances change.
While many advisers have built valuable businesses with loyal clients, delivering advice is more complex and time-consuming than ever. Advisers spend an inordinate amount of time onboarding clients and producing advice, due to the highly regulated, comprehensive nature of advice and the industry’s spaghetti of disconnected systems.
On top of all that, many also juggle the day-to-day responsibilities of running a business.
Consequently, the cost to serve and, in turn, advice fees are high, which is curbing the ability of advice businesses, and the broader profession, to grow. Not only are fees prohibitive for most people, but the industry’s rigid, one-size-fits-all approach is stifling capacity and productivity.
Some firms are managing capacity constraints by focusing on a smaller number of clients and charging higher fees without increasing services. This has arguably right-sized fees but it does not solve the issue of growth.
According to research by Colonial First State, advisers look after 112 ongoing clients on average but aspire to serve 152. Over 40 per cent say they are operating at full capacity.
Of course, some are serving more than 112 clients. They have addressed bottlenecks in the advice process by leveraging technology and automation. In doing so, they have been able to put some capacity back in the system.
We believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s possible.
Stepped change
Australia’s adviser shortage is well known. Since 2019, numbers have fallen from over 25,000 to 15,488, as at 30 June 2026.
This means businesses must lift productivity and find more time in their week without employing more people. But going from 112 client to over 200 clients utilising only existing resources can only happen if businesses can remove the inefficiencies in advice delivery and ongoing client service, and embrace alternative advice models.
To drive stepped change, the advice profession must transform its operating model.
Transformation is a common concept used in business and politics to describe significant shifts and strategic initiatives to deliver material improvements in performance.
Transformation marks a departure from how things have always been done, which usually requires substantial effort, commitment and capital.
Few advice businesses have actively pursued transformation. Over the years, many have incrementally improved their processes, productivity and performance, but they haven’t experienced transformation or stepped change.
While continuous improvement is critically important and the foundation of innovation, the profession must think bigger to close the advice gap. Incrementalism alone won’t get us there.
Connected data is the key
Data is the key and advice businesses have plenty of it. While extracting data from clients and their service providers can be tedious and time consuming, gathering information is generally not a major problem.
The biggest challenge is connecting data, organising it to get a complete and timely picture of a client’s circumstances, and implementing insights to capture opportunities to add value.
This is hard because of the fragmented nature of data and the industry’s legacy systems and technology.
Most advice businesses are built on a myriad of applications and solutions that operate independently of each other, requiring advisers to jump between systems.
They’re not set up to take data from various sources, hold it in a centralised place, and glean insights. As such data, has never taken its rightful place at the centre of the advice process. It has never actively aided decision making, not only in terms of getting the job done for clients, but informing business planning and strategy.
Fortunately, technological advancements mean that advisers don’t have to struggle with fragmented data and inefficient operating models. With the right infrastructure, data can be centralised to create one source of truth, and data management can be automated to provide insights in real time. Having one knowledge base that multiple applications and solutions can interact with is the foundation of efficiency and sustainable growth, especially with the ability to overlay AI technologies like machine learning and large language models to interrogate data, create and allocate tasks, and deploy agentic capabilities that have traditionally been performed by humans.
We believe that current operating models and advice processes need to be overhauled and rebuilt on contemporary technology to facilitate connected data. Core systems have to change not just component parts.
Component tech has an important role to play but a plug and play approach is only effective if core systems and applications can talk to each other. If not, they will just become part of the spaghetti, spew out fragmented data and form an additional layer of inefficiency.
Neil Younger is group chief executive of Entireti.
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