The Cheapest Part of Financial Advice May Be About to Become Free
- Nic Round: Chartered Wealth Manager
- Jul 29
- 2 min read
For most of my career, one of the most important parts of financial advice has been explaining things.
Explaining pensions.
Explaining tax.
Explaining investments.
Explaining the options available.
Today, artificial intelligence can do much of that in seconds.
That's not a criticism of advisers or a celebration of AI. It's simply recognising that something fundamental is changing.
If explanations are becoming freely available, an uncomfortable question follows.
What are people actually paying for?
My thoughts
For decades, financial advice had an information advantage.
That advantage is disappearing.
AI is making financial information increasingly abundant.
Which means the value of advice may need to move somewhere else.
Almost anyone can ask AI a question about pensions, tax or investments and receive an answer within moments.
That doesn't necessarily mean the answer is complete, appropriate or suited to their circumstances. But it does change expectations.
The question is no longer whether AI can explain financial concepts.
Increasingly, it can.
The more interesting question is what happens next.
Financial planning has never really been about collecting information. The difficult part has always been deciding what to do with it.
Most important financial decisions involve uncertainty, trade-offs and competing priorities.
Should I retire now or work another two years?
Should I take the tax hit today or later?
Should I help my children now or preserve more for my own future?
Those aren't questions that can be answered simply by knowing more facts.
They're decisions that require judgement.
That is why I believe the role of a good financial planner is changing.
Not from expert to obsolete.
But from explainer to thinking partner.
As AI becomes better at providing information, the human value may increasingly lie somewhere else.
Helping people ask better questions.
Helping them understand the trade-offs.
Helping them make decisions they can live with.
Perhaps that was always the real job.
AI is simply making it easier to see.
Transcript
"I've been thinking about something this week.
The cheapest part of financial advice...
...may be about to become free.
That probably sounds like a strange thing for a financial planner to say.
But for years, part of my job has been explaining things.
How pensions work.
How tax works.
Writing reports.
Then something occurred to me.
AI can now do much of that in seconds.
So what are people actually paying for?
I'm not sure it's the explanation.
Perhaps it's the judgement.
Perhaps the real value was never explaining things.
Perhaps it was always helping people think more clearly."
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