Why the next 5 years will redefine financial advice

The financial advice profession’s tectonic plates have been moving for the past decade, with rapid changes forcing advisers, legislators and regulators to rethink the wealth experience Australians want and deserve.

However, pressures on the cost and supply side have limited the profession’s ability to evolve to meet consumer demand. The profession lost thousands of advisers in just a few years and from those who remained, tales of burnout and insufficient work-life balance were rife.

In 2025, I believe we’re finally at an inflection point, which will change the trajectory of the advice profession for the better. In the next five years, advice businesses will be further empowered to deliver a premium experience, serve a higher client load, and achieve work-life balance – all while lifting the number of Australians who receive quality financial advice. Technology underpins this evolution, as we detailed in our recent white paper Advice, Evolved.

Here are a few of the reasons I consider the next five years to be a redefining period for advice.

Technology will release a pressure valve for businesses

In conversations I’ve had with advisers in Australia and globally in the past decade, cost and compliance have frequently been cited as the two biggest pain points for practices. They often go hand in hand, with compliance forcing businesses to spend up on paraplanners and other administrative support. However, technology has recently changed that, with tech-enabled solutions delivering compliant advice records at a fraction of the time and cost.

While this has already taken a lot of pressure off businesses, I expect to see an acceleration of tech support mechanisms in the next five years. We’re only starting to see the impact of artificial intelligence on businesses. In five years’ time, I expect manual processing will largely be left to technology, leaving advisers to focus on the more strategic aspects of their roles and achieve work/life balance.

Consumers will engage with advice in new ways

Technology is already allowing consumers to set the tone for how they would like to engage with advice. Instead of waiting for periodical meetings or email correspondence, consumers are increasingly observing their wealth journey in real time through client portals.

In the next five years, I expect consumers to dictate how they want to receive and engage with advice. Some will never want a face-to-face client meeting, while others will find their way to advisers through non-traditional channels. This trend will enable advisers to change how they deliver advice too, with broader opportunities to specialise and scale their offering.

Advisers will be free to focus on what they do best

As I foreshadowed earlier, compliance creep has been responsible for holding advisers back from the core reason they got into the profession in the first place: to strategically advise.

Over the next five years, I believe most advisers will outsource the monotonous parts of their role, such as note-keeping and file updates, to technology. The extra time will then be able to be reinjected into client and business development, allowing advisers to focus more on the coaching aspects of advice, if that’s what they choose.

The bottom line is this: Human advisers will always have an essential role in advice. In this redefining period, technology will give them new freedom to cultivate the career they want. We explore these themes in more detail in the white paper.

Nick Eatock is the CEO and co-founder of intelliflo.