He explained: “At the moment most businesses’ focus will be on consumer duty. It's not on the advice gap.
"Consumer duty is a good thing for clients of firms but it's not a good thing for potential clients that sit in that advice gap. All the energy, all the time, all the compliance has been taken by consumer duty.
"If you're running an advice firm, you're focusing on that and also running your firm. You're not focusing on the advice gap.”
Social media and advice gap
Carolan believed the next “big phase” was that financial planners will begin to showcase their work via social media.
He said: “We have to make it easier for the really great financial planners in the profession to showcase financial planning through social media. So YouTube, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, all those are going to be really important.
"It becomes a marketing thing, particularly as the next generation consumes media differently to the way the previous generation consumed media. So there's a big opportunity there.
"That's going to be the trend we see with more established or younger, exciting financial planners hopefully becoming the next social media influencer.”
From a training element, Carolan believed the industry was doing great work but felt it needed to get better at attracting people into the sector.
He said: “It’s not about attracting new people, we are seeing at NextGen Planners a lot of second careerists that are looking to come into the sector because they have heard it's a great job.
“We have to do a better job of making financial planning look a bit cooler and make it look a bit more dynamic. People want to come into our profession, it's a great profession and there's lots of opportunity. But not everyone knows what we do, and knows we exist.
“If we look at where we were 10 years ago to where we are now, we've come on leaps and bounds in that regard and it will just get faster now. We also definitely have to tackle the diversity issue, but that will happen naturally.”
Carolan believed if firms could showcase great people from diverse backgrounds and demographics it will do the industry good.
“We just need to give more people a voice as a sector,” he added.
