Advisor | February 2026
The financial advisory world could accommodate at least another 30,000 financial advisors, but they’re not available. It’s therefore crucial to attract young talent to create a pipeline that can guarantee the profession’s future.
The average age of financial advisors is rising year after year (the majority is well over 55), and even as life expectancy increases, it’s difficult to imagine a profession—any profession—that will rely on professionals in their seventies in ten to fifteen years.
It’s therefore crucial to recruit young talent, and to make the financial advisory profession attractive to young talent, three things are needed.
The first is that clients and their top managers are sensitive to the issue of generational transition among financial advisors. On this point, to a greater or lesser extent, we can say that the industry is moving, and it’s been a while since we saw it. Almost all networks have a program for recruiting young people to enter the profession.
Without naming names, there are some very advanced organizations that adopt a structured approach, others that have youth integration programs only on paper, but the majority of organizations are virtuous in this regard, fully aware that it is a fundamental choice for the survival of the species.
The second thing needed to recruit young people to enter the profession is for them to be able to work alongside established professionals capable of teaching in the field a skill that is difficult to learn in a university setting.
It’s not a given that an established professional who loves his or her work and puts in the effort is truly predisposed to delegate and develop a young person: this requires both time and the willingness and ability to delegate.
As among entrepreneurs, even the most deserving and successful, financial advisors, too, delegating and gradually handing over to others a job they enjoy and are passionate about, requires a maturity and awareness that isn’t so widespread: every successful professional is more or less unconsciously led to feel almost immortal and to postpone generational transitions further and further.
If this were not the case, it would be impossible to explain why the average age of Italian entrepreneurs is closer to seventy than sixty, and what are financial advisors if not entrepreneurs?
The third thing needed to attract young talent is money. In the 1970s and 1980s, the profession of financial advisor, and, albeit with significant differences, that of banking, guaranteed above-average pay and benefits. Today, due to lower margins, mature markets, and increased competition, working in finance and banking is objectively much less attractive and rewarding for young people than it was for their predecessors.
So without the commitment of the clients, the individual predisposition of senior advisors, and attractive compensation levels, there’s no point in deluding ourselves: in ten years, the average age of financial advisors will rise further.
Long live the current advisors, then, may their health preserve them, in the hope that market dynamics don’t force a reversal, or that new service models and new players emerge that no one sees coming today, but are just around the corner.
Nicola Ronchetti