Some 87.5 per cent of financial advice on TikTok could be ‘potentially misleading’, a survey has found.
Research by pension advisers Almond Financial found that finfluencers producing advice-led content on the platform rarely encourage viewers to do their own financial research.
While some give advice under the guise of selling online courses, e-books or memberships to ‘exclusive’ investment advice.
Almond Financial studied more than 150 TikTok videos across a range of topics including tax advice, pension tips and retirement planning.
According to the firm, the creators behind the videos studied have a combined view count of 78,587,134, with more than 28mn followers combined.
The study found that the majority of financial advice videos were given by unaccredited content creators, with 85.5 per cent of videos not containing any of the usual risk warnings.
Meanwhile 12.5 per cent of content creators were giving advice with the sole aim of selling an online course or e-book.
Additionally, 91.45 per cent of creators didn’t encourage viewers to do their own due diligence before making important financial decisions.
Sam Robinson, principal financial adviser at Almond Financial called the findings of the research “alarming”.
He said: “One shocking finding in the research was the number of creators spreading bad advice about opting out of your workplace pension at a young age.
"It should be noted that any contributions missed now would likely need to be made back at some point in the future to bring your pension pot back up to where it should be, and you’ll have been missing out on employer contributions and investment growth and being less tax efficient too.
He added: “TikTok is also home to lots of creators who make a living off of selling online courses, e-books and more.
"We found that a lot of these accounts give especially poor financial advice, as their primary motivation for creating content isn’t to give sound advice to viewers, but to sell a product that personally enriches them.
“There is a lot of complexity and nuance that comes with sensible financial planning, and life-changing decisions shouldn’t be made off the back of a TikTok video, especially without further research.”
alina.khan@ft.com
