The financial advice industry has a crisis on its hands. It is in desperate need of fresh talent.
This may be a message that has been said a million times, but the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has recently released age-related data on financial advisers which highlights the full scale of the problem.
The vast majority of professionals in the field are, unsurprisingly, aged 50-59, followed by 40-to-49-year-olds.
But advisers aged 30 or under only make up around 6% of all authorised people in the UK.
In a Freedom of Information (FOI) request dated May 2021, and published in April 2022, the FCA provided data sets for financial advisers divided into two categories: those ‘certified’ by authorised firms to provide financial advice under the Senior Manager’s regime, and those authorised as CF30.
At the time, there were 31,899 certified advisers and 11,427 CF30s.
Of the certified ones, just 183 were aged under 25 and 1,574 between the ages of 25 and 29; meaning that certified advisers under the age of 30 made up a mere 5.5%.
Proportions were pretty similar for CF30s, with 78 under the age of 25, and 635 between 25 and 29 years of age – a 6.2% of all CF30s in the sector.
In both categories, 50-59-year-olds and 40-49-year olds led the way with 10,736 and 3,668, respectively, for certified advisers; and 8,366 and 3,103, respectively, for CF30s.
