Financial advisers will be even more relevant in ten years

A story is being told about Australian financial advice that I think gets the picture badly wrong. It goes something like this: The adviser population has collapsed from roughly 26,500 to around 15,600 since the Royal Commission. Compliance costs are rising, and margins are compressing. Robo-advice and artificial intelligence are coming for the rest. On this telling, the profession is in a long, slow decline.

The numbers in that story are accurate, but the conclusion is wrong.

Artificial intelligence is genuinely changing the economics of investment allocation. Systems can now model risk, allocate assets, screen securities, and rebalance portfolios faster and more cheaply than humans. Slowly but visibly, the purely technical part of advice – the part that has underpinned the industry’s pricing model for thirty years – is becoming infrastructure.

Assuming that this means the adviser is becoming infrastructure, too, is a mistake. The reverse is occurring. As technical execution becomes cheaper, the things AI cannot do are becoming more valuable. 

AI does not manage family succession conflicts. It does not sit with two business partners who built something together over decades and help them have the conversation neither of them wants to have. It doesn’t coordinate an accountant, a lawyer, and a financial adviser around a single SME owner’s plan. These are not peripheral problems. 

They are precisely where most Australian business owners need help, and where they receive almost none.

Australia is facing the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in its history, somewhere between the Productivity Commission’s $3.5 trillion estimate and JB Were’s more recent $5.4 trillion figure over the next two decades. A meaningful share of that transfer will involve a business. And the three professions meant to help – financial advisers, accountants, lawyers – are, all three at once, under unprecedented strain.

Many have thoroughly documented the adviser’s collapse. Less recognised is that the same pressure is now reaching the other two professions. From 1 July 2026, Australia’s anti-money-laundering regime extends, for the first time, to accountants, as a substantial new compliance burden landing on a profession whose university enrolments have almost halved since 2018. The legal profession has headcount but rarely deep specialisation in succession and estate work, even as that work becomes increasingly complex.

You cannot solve a problem of this size by adding more specialists. The training pipelines aren’t in place, and even if they were, the work itself is becoming more multidisciplinary, not less. The owner of a $4 million business now needs an accountant who understands the proposed trust tax, a lawyer who understands the post-Budget position on testamentary trusts, and a financial adviser who understands how to fund what the other two have agreed. Each professional knows their part. Almost no one has been holding the entire picture together.

That gap  between three separate sources of expertise and one coordinated plan – is where the next generation of advice must land. The adviser of the future is not someone who picks better funds. It is someone who becomes the strategic relationship lead in a client’s life: the continuity coordinator, the one who brings the A-team together, the trusted figure who guides a family or a business through the decisions that matter most and occur rarely.

The work is harder than picking funds. It is also considerably more valuable, harder for technology to displace, and genuinely in critically short supply.

For advisers, this is not bad news. It is the profession’s most significant strategic opportunity in a generation, provided it acts. The window for development is open now, but it will not stay open forever. 

Advisers who add succession planning, family governance, and business continuity to their practice are building something AI does not threaten. Advisers who are not are betting their business model on a market whose margins are visibly compressing.

The same logic, in reverse, applies to clients. A business owner who still believes the most important question their adviser can answer is “how should my portfolio be allocated” is asking the wrong question, and getting answers that will matter less over time than the questions they are not asking. What happens if a business partner dies, becomes ill, or wants out? Who would buy this business, and at what price? Has anyone in the room coordinated the lawyer, the accountant, and the adviser around a single plan?

The Australian financial advice profession is not dying. The market and technology are asking advisers to step into a more strategic, more human, and more valuable role than the one they have occupied.

The advisers who take that step will be more relevant in ten years than they are today.

Brian Boggs is a former financial adviser and is the author of the book The Advice Gap: Why business succession needs clarity and what you can do about it.