Advising the family, not just the client

Nearly four in ten advised clients have a family member who’s also being advised. That’s the shape of a lot of client banks across UK advice firms, and while it’s not all that new a revelation, it’s increasingly the way that firms service clients. If most of client wealth is managed on platforms, then it follows that platforms need to be able to service families well to attract these client segments.

Family linking is a key attribute

One crucial way of doing so is making sure the family linking proposition – where a family’s investments are effectively pooled for the purposes of platform charge calculation – is as broad as possible while making it easy for an adviser to manage links themselves on the platform.

Demand for family linking based on due diligence requests on our Analyser tool saw this move from 126th place in ‘must have’ rankings for platforms in 2024 to 40th place in 2025. That’s out of over 600 features we provide data points for.

Just about every platform offers family linking today, with some differentiation on the number of possible links, but the broadest fall just short of family pots. It can pass on some huge discounts, especially if there’s one large investment – most likely a chunky pension – lowering lots of smaller family investments’ platform charges, with more in investment returns going to all linked members.

A curious feature of percentage-based platform charging is that smaller investment pots are invariably charged the highest percentage. As wealth accrues and the investment moves up the tiers the overall percentage charge comes down. Withdrawals then mean a return to those more costly charging tiers. Family linking enables smaller pots to benefit from a lower charging tier in accumulation, but also – in theory – allows for these smaller pots to grow, replace assets being withdrawn and keep charges for all linked family members lower.

Overcoming perception gaps can support intergenerational relationships

Serving clients as a family unit has obvious retention benefits for both adviser and platform, but clients of different ages have different expectations of what advice and advisers are. Our (award winning) New Blood research also highlights the different perceptions of advisers by the younger generation.

When asked what key skills and attributes are needed to be a financial planner, the younger folks saw the most important skills as being good with numbers, able to explain things clearly and having good problem solving, research and technology skills. Advisers themselves focused on emotional skills like being an open and honest individual and understanding how people feel. Being able to use technology and being good with numbers were the least common skills cited by advisers and are also the biggest gap between young people’s and financial planners’ perceptions of what makes a good planner.

Those perception gaps have knock on effects for family unit planning in advice firms. With the rise of D2C propositions actively targeting the younger generations, and succeeding, the obvious challenge here is how to build and maintain relationships to retain younger clients.

Family linking can help to keep prices competitive with clients interested in lower-cost D2C propositions, and research we’ve conducted over the years has shown that the value of advice is highly rated by clients. That creates the sweet spot of value.

What will continue to evolve is how advice is delivered and understood by a younger generation. Whether that’s via the use of new technology, bespoke pricing models more akin to what they might normally experience when paying for services, or a different suite of services altogether, it’s going to require skills in problem solving, emotional intelligence, and being able to explain things clearly.

AI can help but only to a point

Of course, AI inescapably plays a part in this; our latest State of the Advice Nation research shows most firms are using AI in some form or other, and that’s doubled over the past year. We fully expect almost every firm to be using AI to some extent when we review this year’s dataset in Q4. The AI that’s used is typically for efficiency savings, which is a comfortable use case, but it gets more uncomfortable the closer it gets to the client. Helping with minuting meetings? Absolutely. Helping make client recommendations? Much less so.

That’s got some similarities as to why robo-advice, in its previous guise at least, didn’t resonate with investors nearly to the extent that was expected. A primary reason for this is that while technology can absolutely help in researching and understanding, when it comes to parting with actual hard-earned cash, humans wanted reassurance from another human.

Thankfully, those are all key skills that advisers themselves agree make a good financial planner.