Tomorrow, the world: PictureWealth has growth ambitions beyond Australia

David Pettit is only half-joking when he says he wants to establish the first financial advice business on Mars. The founder and executive director of PictureWealth uses an extreme example to illustrate the potential he sees for taking what the business offers outside Australia. 

PictureWealth is, at its core, a tech business built to empower financial advisers to deliver on the mission of “connecting more advice to more lives”. It used to be “to more Australians”, but the tagline would not work for a business with international – if not actually interplanetary – expansion ambitions. 

PictureWealth has come a long way since 2023 when it rode into the collective consciousness of the Australian advice industry with the acquisitions of the Insight and Futuro licensees from Highfield Group. 

This year it completed the acquisition of Capstone, taking its total adviser numbers to more than 360, including 55 employed advisers who already work on its proprietary system. 

It’s this “regulated advice infrastructure” that Pettit says the firm is keen to expand to self-employed advisers in its network, and which will underpin its growth both domestically and internationally. He says the infrastructure improves adviser efficiency and is scalable. 

Since the Future of Financial Advice reforms and the Hayne royal commission, advisers have found themselves putting 90 per cent of their time into compliance and admin and 10 per cent into client work, and the industry has not yet shaken that, Pettit says. 

“If you can have the system doing the 90 per cent, which is the compliance and regulatory work, you’re seeing that manifest in our employed advisers at the moment, because they’re seeing twice as many clients [as the industry average],” he tells Professional Planner. 

He says this gives advisers the choice of how to use their new-found freedom. Some might opt to scale back their working hours, while others might want to pursue growth opportunities. Other advisers will have other ideas, and it’s up to the individual. 

Pettit says the foundation of the advice infrastructure is client data, advisers’ access to it, and the ability to deliver a seamless client experience irrespective of who the adviser may be.  

For example, one adviser in a firm might be on leave when a client query comes in, leaving another adviser to deal with it. Accessing all the relevant file notes, conversations and outstanding paperwork is a simple matter of asking the system. 

PictureWealth itself will act as a source of client referrals. An app, Welfie, already exists to help consumers connect their financial data and information to its advice infrastructure, and can also connect them to advisers whose practices have adopted it, so clients arrive with their data ready. 

“If we can double the capacity of every adviser, the next job is to help fill their diaries with new clients. Do that across the market and it will have a huge impact on closing the advice gap,” Pettit says. 

Only practices that adopt the PictureWealth advice infrastructure will get referrals, he says, and “we are weeks and months away in terms of additional spend and marketing activity that we’re just about to get going”. 

PictureWealth chief executive officer and executive director Allan Maitland says employed advisers using the platform sometimes see two, and even two and a half, times as many clients as advisers in a normal business. Pettit says that lifts advisers’ margins and makes their practices worth more, including to PictureWealth as a potential buyer. 

“You want to bring someone in, you want to go on holidays, you want to bring a PY through. You’ve got client service teams you don’t know, and they’re highly transitional. [An adviser has] the ability to log onto a system to find out anything about the client before they make a phone call. So, the client experience is more singular in nature across your business, because the technology pulls it all together in conversational tone,” Maitland says. 

He says PictureWealth runs about 1000 reviews a month through the platform, which shows how each adviser adopts it. 

“We can tweak training [and] some of the visuals, some of the documentation and some of the processes continually, because every review shows us what is working for the client and where an adviser needs more support,” Maitland says. 

Pettit says banks and super funds have “just started naming the thing that we’ve been building for the last five-plus years, and that is the regulated advice infrastructure”. 

“That is the end-to-end operating environment that allows an unadvised client who has a goal or objective to move towards that, and then the regulatory guardrails and the technological and human capability within that infrastructure to deliver on that,” he says. 

He says the offer to an institution is not software as a service or robo-advice, it is “wealth as a service, and our regulated advice infrastructure could be adopted by a major in the way it could by mum and dad Australia who need advice”. 

A bank or super fund that decided to hire 1000 advisers would have to recruit them from the roughly 15,000 who have already moved through a period of  regulatory upheaval to emerge stronger, more fit for purpose, and charging higher fees. Pettit says those advisers are not tuned to serving the clients of banks and super funds, whose average balances are far lower, and where advice has historically been unprofitable. 

“Where our model is different is we are serving those clients, and in the great majority of our employed adviser business, the client need not meet with the same adviser twice. The client’s full record travels with them, so they are looked after properly whichever adviser is available,” he says. 

Pettit says a deal of that kind, in which an institution connected a large client base to PictureWealth, would test the supply of advice. If it sent more clients than the advisers could serve, the result would be a brand problem, so PictureWealth would have to build supply and demand together. 

Other licensees also argue that technology can lift adviser efficiency. Pettit says the larger licensees, whether listed, owned by private equity or building through roll-ups, are pursuing “financial engineering strategies”, and that the contested space in Australia is consolidating with “M&A happening for M&A’s sake”. 

“We have made acquisitions along the way, but never simply to become a larger advice business,” he says. 

“Each one has brought advisers and clients onto one regulated platform, so the technology does more of the work and each adviser can look after more people.  

“The uncontested space is four times larger than the contested space, and that’s where we’re pointing.” 

Pettit says PictureWealth’s funds under advice have grown to $22 billion, from an estimated $3 billion to $5 billion in 2023, and Maitland says the group has grown from about 10 advisers to more than 360 in less than five years. 

“There’s been a lot of structure, rigour and controls to make that happen,” Maitland says.  

Pettit says Capstone made it through a longer list of potential acquisition candidates on the quality of its regulatory oversight and people. 

“A licensee’s job is to keep the environment safe for both the practitioner and those that are operating on the left and the right of them,” he says. 

The approach of connecting consumers to their financial data and providing advice infrastructure to support them can work just as well anywhere in the world, notwithstanding the idiosyncrasies of local laws and regulations. 

Pettit says about 60 per cent of US 401(k) members feel they need financial advice, but only 35 per cent get it from a professional adviser, and McKinsey estimates the US will be short about 100,000 advisers by 2034. 

He says helping clients make, save, grow and protect their wealth “doesn’t have any jurisdictional constraints around how you deliver that service, and that exports really, really fast”. 

“You then just need to operate in that regulatory environment,” he says. 

Maitland says PictureWealth can bring in advisers at PY level, employ them for as long as they want, move them to a licensed practice if they want to run their own business, and buy them out when they retire. 

He says the pathway is already producing new advisers: an insurance specialist brought into client services through the PY program has just qualified as an adviser. 

“If you look at the adviser life cycle, it’s almost equally as important to the client life cycle, particularly given the numbers in our industry. If we are able to keep that flywheel going, development of advisers, development of businesses, that will enable us also to deliver on more advice to more lives,” he says. 

Pettit says “technology is not the limiting factor”  

“It’s the ability to connect people to the opportunity that they’re not executing on.” 

The author attended and presented at the THRIVE 2026 adviser conference in Perth in October as a guest of PictureWealth.