Opinion: This is how we bring more young people into the financial advice profession

The industry has spent the last decade asking why young people aren’t entering the financial advice profession. The answers we keep landing on are about compensation, training programs and university partnerships. We talk about it as a marketing problem — if we just pitched the job better, more of them would come.

I think they’re hearing the pitch fine. They’re rejecting it on its merits.

A generation has grown up watching disintermediation reshape every industry they’ve ever paid attention to. They’ve watched travel agents disappear, record labels lose their grip, taxi medallions collapse, retail stores replaced by phone apps. They’ve figured out that the future does not belong to the person sitting between the customer and the thing. It belongs to whomever owns the relationship with the customer directly.

Then they look at financial services, and they see what looks like the worst kind of intermediary job. Selling products from a shelf. Taking a clip on the way through. Adding a layer between the client and the outcome.

They are not wrong to be skeptical of that work. They have watched the economy long enough to know they don’t want to be a middleman.

The industry’s response to this has mostly been defensive. We argue that human advice matters. We point to studies showing the value of behavioural coaching. We circle the wagons around the parts of the job that algorithms can’t yet replicate. The whole posture is defensive, and that’s how it’s heard.

Embrace disintermediation

Young people aren’t wrong about disintermediation. The intermediary job is dying. We should let it. The product-pusher version of this profession was never sustainable in the long term. It was a distribution channel dressed up as advice. If the world is killing it, the world is doing this profession a favour.

The job that’s worth doing — the one a young person ought to want — is the one where you stop being an intermediary altogether and become the thing itself. Where the relationship is the deliverable. Where the practice you build is the asset, not the products that pass through it. Where a client pays you for your judgment, your coordination across the messy hairball of their financial and human life and the trust they’ve built with you over time. That’s not a sales role. That’s a profession.

It looks more like a law practice or a medical practice. It’s billed on retainer or fee-for-service. It owns the client relationship directly rather than renting it from a firm. It coordinates other professionals —accountants, lawyers, investment managers — rather than gatekeeping product. The advisor isn’t selling a thing. The advisor is the thing.

A 22-year-old looking at this industry from the outside has almost no way to see this version of the work. The recruiting machine doesn’t pitch it because it’s harder to scale, harder to commoditize and doesn’t fit neatly into anyone’s grid. So, we keep recruiting young people into the dying version of the job while the live version sits right there, unadvertised.

If we want the right young people in this profession, the conversation must change. Stop trying to convince them that the intermediary role is still valuable. They’re not buying it, and frankly they shouldn’t.

Show them the role that has nothing to do with intermediation — the one where they build something they own, where they are the value, where automation isn’t a threat because the deliverable was never something a machine could produce in the first place.

The math, the optimization, the rebalancing, the document generation, the compliance checks — that work will be automated, and it should. None of that is the job.

The job is sitting across from a couple who can’t agree on whether to retire. The job is walking a widow through the first year of decisions she didn’t expect to be making alone. The job is telling a business owner that the structure his last advisor put in place is going to cost his family millions and helping him fix it without losing the family in the process.

You cannot algorithm your way through grief. You cannot optimize a family through an estate. As long as people on the other side of the desk are human — contradictory, afraid, hopeful, broken in their own particular ways — they are going to need other broken humans to walk them through it.

That’s the job. It’s not dying. It’s the most automation-proof work in financial services, and we keep failing to tell anyone it exists.

The young people we want are the ones who already understand they don’t want to be middlemen. They are the ones who want to build something that’s theirs. We have been pitching them the wrong profession. The one they actually want has been here the whole time.