Martin urged advisers to start thinking about how they could spend more time doing the things they are good at and they love.
Rise of AI
He also discussed how AI will help advisers to be able to spend time doing the things they love.
“So not only do we need to think about what we enjoy doing, what we are good at, you also need to be aware that some of the nuts and bolts that some of you might still be hanging on to are absolutely going to get cannibalised by technology. So what are we going to do?
“Here's my view, hopefully at least for the rest of my career, humans will still do some of these things better than machines.”
Martin thought human reassurance would never be taken away by machines and humans would always want to have emotional support from another human.
“We think that businesses could organise themselves differently to be more effective in the way that they serve their clients.
“If we're going to have a unique set of skills that are based around ethics and judgement, around trust and connection, and that our role within all of that is to be the key point of trust with our clients, we need to work a lot harder to make sure that we have enough time to do that properly.
“Instead of you being the first point of contact, assuming you're the financial planner, find somebody who's much nicer than you and make them a fundamental part of your team, and choose them for their skills,” he explained.
Changing the structure
Martin believed the traditional model of financial planner, paraplanner and admin was a “defunct model” and didn’t work for the “new world”.
“It's not going to take advantage of the technology, and it puts the wrong people in the wrong place,” he added.
Martin discussed the notion he had heard from another adviser who said financial planners could look after twice as many clients providing all the other things are being taken care of by a client manager.
“So if you are a financial planner at the moment and you're doing 17 different jobs, have a think about this in a different way. You might actually listen to this and think I'm not sure I'm doing the right job.
“You might think 'I hate the strategy part, emotional empathy is really hard work for me. Maybe I can be in the relationship space and bring somebody else into my business to look at doing the strategy and the coaching part of the job. Maybe I should be in the technical space. Maybe I've always loved being a technician. I never liked writing reports.'
