We chose to feature Stacey because his vantage point, leading a fast-growing WealthTech business at the intersection of AI, regulation and advice, offers a clear view of where the industry is heading.

The way clients access, pay for, and value advice is changing and fast. In this revealing Q&A, Stacey Body, CEO and Co-founder of Aventur, shares why AI will not just tweak the advisry model, it will dismantle it, and all with the backing of the UK Government.

The UK financial advisory landscape has changed rapidly in recent years. What motivated that shift?

The UK advisory space has seen huge changes, largely because traditional models can no longer keep up with rising regulatory pressure, increasing costs, and changing consumer expectations.

The number of advisors has declined, while rules like the Retail Distribution Review and, more recently, the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Consumer Duty rule in 2023 have pushed firms to focus on wealthier clients - unintentionally widening the advice gap. With increased reporting and servicing requirements for clients, the cost of delivering regulated advice is now around £1,900 per client per year, effectively pricing smaller clients out of advice.

At the same time, generational changes and the Great Wealth Transfer mean fewer people want to engage with traditional advice models. The next generation would much rather have technological solutions that can educate and support them in making more immediate decisions, preferring having control over their finances with fast, digital tools over traditional advice. An estimated 87% of children inheriting wealth from their parents won’t stay with their parents’ advisors. Technology has stepped in to fill the gap, from digital savings apps to AI tools – an estimated almost one in three people use AI weekly for financial advice, with ChatGPT the favoured tool.

COVID-19 accelerated this shift, normalising remote advice and driving adoption of robo-advisors, which now manage over two million UK accounts (Source: Boring Money Insights). The FCA’s Smart Data initiative and upcoming Open Finance framework (expected in 2026) will push this transformation even further by enabling greater data sharing and more personalised, tech-driven financial guidance.

Overall, regulatory pressure, rising costs, and changing consumer behaviour have exposed the limits of traditional advice and created the conditions for technology, and especially AI, to reshape the UK wealth management sector.

But AI and Fintech adoption is not without its flaws.  What are the shortfalls of current solutions?

So, on one end you've got basic LLMs (large language models), and they’re great at predicting words. In theory, you could put all financial advisFar training manuals into an LLM, and it would ace the advisor exams because you've given it the context behind it.

As a result, AI can provide answers to questions which may be helpful, for example “how much money can I put into an ISA?” or “what are the effects of the latest budget on ISA contributions?”, but it doesn't give you context, is unspecific, isn’t personalised, and doesn't necessarily provide real solutions for personal financial planning. It doesn't know the individual’s circumstances, what it is they want, what it is they have and don't have, and what they want to achieve.

The other issue with the limitation of most AIs is the implementation of that advice. Doing all the research is fine, but you will only get the ideas as to how to do something.  For example, we all know how you could save money or even how to lose weight, but it doesn't meanF you're going to go out and exercise regularly and make healthier food choices. Just having an AI system that tells you an answer to a question without any context, without any ability to act on it and then monitor and constantly improve, doesn't really help to change people’s circumstances.

Understandably, AI seems a much better option to many than the current advisor market, that is excluding individuals who aren’t wealthy enough. And yes, AI does have its shortfalls, but that's exactly what we're trying to fix.

Is it the technology that is falling short, or the way the industry is deploying it?

I think the issue lies with the way the industry is deploying it.

When I started my career, we visited clients with a report that was dated the end of December, and you would go and see the client in April. Thankfully, things have moved on since then! That ‘stuck in one moment in time’ approach is increasingly irrelevant now, especially when everybody's got a mobile phone that they're looking at constantly. Yet many systems still fall short. In the most extreme cases, clients see a financial advisor only once a year, to get a snapshot of whether or not their finances are still on track.

The goal is to develop a solution that combines the insight and emotional intelligence of human advisors with the capabilities of AI. This would allow people to see what they've got, set their own goals and expectations, and continually track their performance while being guided to make better financial decisions. It's about developing a solution that provides real-time, continuous financial monitoring and proactive decision support, processing data and running financial scenarios 24 hours a day. This effectively gives clients the benefit of ongoing, personalised analytical power that was previously impossible to deliver at scale.

Ultimately, the right solutions will make people more educated, informed, comfortable around financial planning, and, at the end of the day, wealthier.

The industry faces two main barriers to achieving this:

1. Incentives: Larger firms are set in the way that they deal with clients. They are financially rewarded for how they currently operate and cannot afford, or are unwilling, to do things differently. It's simply too much of a change for them.

2. Experience: Many people and businesses believe that AI is just ChatGPT or Perplexity, barely scratching the surface of what it is capable of doing.

Looking ahead, how will these developments reshape the way wealth management is delivered?

The combination of AI, regulation and changing client expectations will fundamentally shift how advice is delivered. Traditional percentage fees and annual reviews won’t survive. Instead, three big changes are already emerging:

Per-hour model: paying for advice only when needed

I believe that in the next 5 years the industry will have moved away from a percentage fee model and annual charges to a per-hour model, just like a lawyer or an accountant. The days of monetising knowledge are over. Let's face it, AI will have much more knowledge than any one individual, so trying to leverage your knowledge will become a thing of the past.

With clients able to see their portfolios and goals in real time, advice will become situation-based: “Help me understand this decision,” rather than paying for continuous oversight.

DIY wealth management: technology first, advisor second

The next generation, those now in their 20s and 30s, don’t want to go to a traditional financial advisor, where they’ll go through a long fact-finding process, followed by a recommendation process, only to be given a lengthy report on which investments they should make.

They want something that they can do themselves. They want to be empowered, educated, and to use technology to achieve that, which generally means a smartphone because that's what everybody spends their time on.

They’ll absolutely need human guidance, but it has to be when they need it, and on their terms. Not via an expensive ongoing advice fee that fits traditional advice firm business models.

For the foreseeable future, AI systems and technology will also have limitations. It's going to be great for everyday folk with investments, mortgages, and pensions, coming in under around £750,000, while advisors focus on the complex cases that technology can’t fully solve.

EQ is where human advisors will still lead

As knowledge becomes commoditised, emotional intelligence is where the human-to-human relationship will become valuable and is the advisor’s true differentiator. Supporting clients through complex situations, life changes and helping them to understand complex trade-offs better will be where humans add real value.

This will be especially true for high-net-worth clients, where issues like multi-jurisdiction planning and succession still require specialist human judgment, even if the next generation expects digital tools alongside that expertise.

In short, AI will transform the industry from a knowledge-based, fee-heavy model into one centred on on-demand advice, tech-driven self-service and human emotional intelligence.

And what does it mean specifically for the UK?

The UK is something of a world leader when it comes to AI adoption, with the government leading the way in terms of investment and implementing regulations that allow AI to be integrated into financial advice. This creates the conditions for the UK to differentiate itself internationally.

As part of the UK Government’s Financial Services Growth and Competitiveness Strategy, the ambition is that “By 2035, the UK will once again be the global location of choice for financial services firms”, citing “Embracing innovation and leveraging the UK’s Fintech leadership” as one of the five key elements in achieving that goal.

A key initiative for propelling the industry is the upcoming FCA Smart Data Accelerator scheme, which aims to progress open finance and smart data across businesses in the UK, with plans for a roadmap to be released in March 2026.

Effectively, this will elevate data sharing beyond just banking, to include pensions, investments, mortgages and savings to allow wealth platforms to become a single source of information for an individual's financial landscape.

By removing data barriers and enabling access to richer data, there will be a greater opportunity for the development of more personalised, more engaging and more transparent solutions providing automated planning and comparison tools at scale.

I think an initiative such as this is well overdue, and is a crucial step towards Fa more transparent, interoperable and consumer-focused industry.

Research from an FCA survey in 2024 shows that only 8.6% of people received regulated advice in the past 12 months, meaning that nearly 92% received none. That gap represents a huge opportunity to engage with those who are currently priced out of advice. At the same time, I expect the number of people receiving traditional, advisor-led advice to decline even further, as AI usage increases and advisors focus on servicing fewer, wealthier and more complex clients due to the cost of providing regulated advice.

If the UK embraces AI responsibly and at pace, it can expand access to advice for millions while strengthening its position as a global financial hub.

Which side of the AI fence do you sit on?

I think you might have already guessed! I believe everybody should have the right to know what their future looks like, not just the wealthy.  And to do that, we need to democratise access to financial advice, with AI enabling that.

What would you say to companies that are still undecided about working with AI?

In my opinion, if you're not using AI and your competition is, then you're going to be left behind.

I see firms that are using note-taking tools and think that they're implementing AI systems, when that's just touching the surface of what is possible. Traditional business models will need to fundamentally change because the value of what they're providing will decline as AI does more of the legwork.  Legal and accounting companies have already embraced AI – it’s no longer a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’ financial services will advance beyond using AI for more than simple query responses and into delivering financial advice, like we do at Aventur for over 3000 people,

“If you're trying to leverage your knowledge, then you need to very quickly learn to cook a good breakfast because that's where AI will really challenge you.”

Unless you're leaning into AI and actually allowing it to help you and change your business models around it, I fear old school firms will be left behind. A Cambridge professor I worked with recently said, “if you're trying to leverage your knowledge, then you need to very quickly learn to cook a good breakfast because that's where AI will really challenge you.”

The biggest challenge will come from competitors that have already fully implemented AI, because it brings efficiencies that drive down costs. So, unless you are prepared to adapt and adopt it, you’ll become extinct. That's often been the challenge with the financial industry - it likes to keep the status quo.

At Aventur, we’re focused on changing that by empowering people through technology to make better financial decisions. Too many people are left behind without proper planning or access to the right tools. We're building technology to help and empower people and, hopefully, change the industry for good, both for individuals and other financial institutions.

Conclusion

As can be gathered from our discussion, the UK wealth management industry is standing at a turning point. With rising costs, regulatory shifts, and growing demand for more accessible advice, traditional models are no longer fit for purpose. Technology, particularly AI, is becoming the foundation of a new era in advice: one that’s more responsive, inclusive and scalable. If deployed well, it can close the advice gap, empower millions, and redefine what good financial guidance looks like.

Mark Estcourt,

CEO at Cavendish Family Office