FAJ Fee Advisor Journal | September 2025
If we were to imagine what the financial advisor of the future will be like, that is, in five to ten years, it’s easy to hypothesize with reasonable certainty that he or she will be distinguished by at least five characteristics.
These characteristics, of course, are already evident in some of today’s advisors.
The first characteristic is the ability and, to some extent, the need to work in a team and the resulting support of the bank and the client.
The importance of teamwork and client support is recognized today by 59% of advisors; twenty years ago, only 10% of financial advisors recognized the importance of teamwork and the support of their bank.
The transition from the so-called free agent to the professional who knows how to work in a team occurred for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, the expansion of financial advisory services to include wealth management, which requires a broader range of skills, difficult to concentrate and concentrate in a single professional.
Consider the inheritance, tax, legal, and corporate issues affecting the most sophisticated and wealthy clients, who today represent the majority of clients who turn to a financial advisor (40% of private clients).
The team is becoming increasingly important not only for its multidisciplinary nature but also for its multigenerational composition, meaning the coexistence within it of financial advisors of different generations who know how to listen and use the language of different generations.
Longer life expectancies mean that today four generations of clients sit at the consulting table: those in their twenties, forties, sixties, and eighties. It is essential that each of them be able to interact with an advisor who understands their expectations and language.
The second characteristic of the advisor of the future, partly connected to the first, is the importance of training and the resulting certification of skills.
The diverse needs of an increasingly sophisticated, well-heeled, and wealthy clientele will require a selective approach among financial advisors: success will be the prerogative of the most knowledgeable among them, those who have invested in their skills and professionalism.
The third characteristic that will distinguish the advisor of the future will be an increasingly important component of fee-based consulting in the compensation package. Like all valuable professionals, financial advisors will be recognized for their value regardless of the commissions implicit in the subscription of individual products.
The fourth characteristic of the advisor of the next five to ten years will be the centrality and importance of digital platforms to support clients, both in their day-to-day operations and in communicating with their advisors, known as web collaboration.
The fifth characteristic of the advisor of the future will be represented by an ever-increasing and more profitable use of Artificial Intelligence, a true turning point and a turning point of our era, a bit like the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s.
The financial advisor of the future will be the one who manages to achieve all five key characteristics, that is, to embody these five characteristics, currently common to many but not yet all advisors.
Nicola Ronchetti