There is a sentence almost every financial adviser has heard. “I trust you. You know more about this than I do.” It sounds like a compliment. In many ways, it is. Trust is earned, particularly in an industry where people place deeply personal financial decisions in another person’s hands. Yet I have always thought there is something slightly uncomfortable hidden inside that sentence. Should the gap between what the adviser understands and what the client understands remain quite so wide?
Financial services has become exceptionally good at expertise. We have specialists who can navigate regulation, risk and products with impressive fluency. The difficulty arises when that fluency meets someone who does not speak the language of industry.
A conversation can sound perfectly clear to the person giving the advice and completely bewildering to the person receiving it. How many times have we seen the client nodding, the advisor continuing and then eventually, something gets signed?
Everyone leaves satisfied until, perhaps years later, the client discovers what they actually agreed to. That is when a communication problem becomes a trust problem.
FIA has previously emphasised transparency and fair customer outcomes, while observing that technology should enhance rather than replace the human element in financial advice. I think that human element deserves more attention than we sometimes give it. The value of an intermediary is not simply access to information. Information is everywhere now. The modern client can search an unfamiliar financial term before an adviser has finished making coffee. What remains scarce is understanding and understanding is where advice becomes education.
I do not mean that every adviser needs to become a lecturer. Anyone who has endured a long presentation in a windowless conference room will appreciate why that would be a terrible idea. I mean something much simpler. Good advice should leave a person more financially capable than it found them.
For those of us who work in education, there is a familiar moment when you realise somebody has genuinely understood something. It is not when they repeat your words back to you. It is when they begin putting the idea into their own words. Financial advice has its own version of that moment. The client stops simply accepting the recommendation and starts participating in the decision. That changes the relationship.
It also challenges an old assumption about professional authority. There was perhaps a time when expertise was reinforced by complexity. The professional knew things the customer did not and that knowledge gap carried status. Today, I think the opposite is increasingly true. Real expertise is generous. It does not need complexity to make itself impressive. It can take something difficult and make it accessible without making it simplistic.
This matters enormously in South Africa, where financial pressure can shape decisions that have consequences long after the immediate difficulty has passed. FIA has reported that advisers are seeing financially constrained clients make emotionally driven choices that can undermine longer-term financial wellbeing. That is precisely when understanding becomes valuable. Someone facing financial strain does not necessarily need more information. They need help seeing what today’s decision might mean for tomorrow. There is something else at stake here too. Financial literacy is usually discussed as a deficit belonging to the consumer. We say people need to become more financially literate, as though the problem exists entirely on their side of the desk.
Perhaps intermediaries should take some ownership of the language through which financial knowledge is communicated. If a knowledgeable person cannot make an important idea understandable, it is worth asking whether the listener has failed to understand, or whether we have failed to explain. I find that distinction important because education, at its best, does not make people dependent on the educator.
It gives them greater agency. The same can be true of financial advice.
An informed client may ask harder questions. They may challenge assumptions. Occasionally they may arrive convinced that something they watched online at midnight has transformed them into an investment strategist. That is not a threat to professional advice. It is an opportunity for better advice. The intermediary who can turn information into perspective has a role no search engine can easily reproduce.
Working at the intersection of education and financial services, as GIFS, I have reinforced my belief that learning has little value if knowledge cannot be applied when a real decision arrives. That principle belongs just as comfortably in an adviser’s office as it does in a classroom. There will always be disclosures to make, documents to complete and regulatory requirements to satisfy. Those things protect the integrity of financial advice. Yet there is another standard worth aspiring to, one that will never fit neatly into a compliance checklist. When the client leaves, do they understand their financial life a little better? If they do, the adviser has delivered something that extends beyond the product placed that day. They have transferred knowledge. And knowledge, unlike a signature on a form, stays with people. That may be one of the most enduring forms of value an intermediary can create.