In a highly uncertain global landscape, the outlook for 2026 feels unusually difficult to call. But technology is one area where it’s impossible not to be excited about the year ahead.
The reason? The ubiquity of the network – the internet. As more and more product providers, platforms and software providers connect and integrate, and as APIs become the dominant mode of connection, data flows ever more freely from one activity to another – and progress grows ever faster.
Over the years, I’ve talked a lot about the industry being wired the wrong way round, from product systems to customers, rather than from customers to product systems. Today, that’s changing rapidly.
It’s becoming easier and easier to integrate, and to get the information you need when you need it. In turn, that’s unlocking significant opportunities for greater productivity, greater efficiency, greater value-add and greater ability to personalise the experience for the client.
None of this is simple, because financial services are complicated. Products are complex. People are complex. People’s needs are complex.
Millions and millions of rows of data are flowing into the financial planning system overnight
Even the hard facts of financial planning can be difficult to describe in software: a client may have a portfolio of funds, some of which hold private market assets or smaller companies, nested in a general investment account (GIA), nested in a SIPP, sitting on a platform. Different systems describe these arrangements in different ways.
An even tougher task is to accurately describe the risk of, say, those private assets, in the funds, in the GIA, in the SIPP, on the platform. But these are technical challenges that the industry has leaned into and addressed – and which, today, can be automated.
The result of that work is the ability not only to integrate, but to ensure the consistency of data across the industry, so the hard facts are agreed on and are at your fingertips, without rekeying.
Gone are the days of manual contract enquiries. With more and more product providers moving to bulk valuations, millions and millions of rows of data are flowing into the financial planning system overnight, and they’re being pushed into the client’s financial plan without any action from the adviser.
As an industry, we’re getting much better at understanding how people actually feel about their finances
Not only can all that data be accessed more easily, but it can be mapped and analysed in increasingly sophisticated ways. That means suitability assessments that are right first time, every time. And it enables more value-add analysis, whether that’s identifying when portfolios need rebalancing or flagging patterns across your client base.
That’s the hard data. What about the soft data? Historically, drawing out soft facts from the client and turning them into useable data has been an even tougher challenge.
But today, as an industry, we’re getting much better at understanding how people actually feel about their finances – about risk, yes, but also about sustainability, about their financial wellbeing. And we can track that over time.
Rounding out the picture is the ability to use AI to capture what we would historically have called unstructured data – information about the client’s arrangements, income, expenses – and to structure it and pull it into the fact find.
Combining those data sources opens the door to much more engaging financial planning. It helps with the speed and efficiency of the advice process – and it also allows you to add value, because you can see someone’s financial personality and understand how they’re likely to respond.
When AI meets advice – innovation or compliance minefield?
In the future, again with the help of AI, that might mean predicting how a client might behave in particular market conditions and delivering an automated communication, through your financial planning app, that provides the right reassurance, when it’s needed.
This is where, potentially, it gets even more exciting. Beyond generative, prompt-driven AI models, the next phase is agentic AI. By combining the reasoning power of large language models with the ability to undertake actions, agentic AI can work more autonomously, carrying out multi-step tasks without human intervention.
Using AI agents to gather data is already a well-established use case in the insurance sector in the US. The same process could apply for wealth.
For example, agentic AI could help you provide a KYC process that becomes, for the client, a ‘know yourself’ process – giving them an understanding of how they’re balancing the monthly budget, the risk they’re taking, their levels of protection versus their liabilities and more.
The ability to use generative and agentic AI to personalise the experience and remove the admin load is enormous
Lifting the veil for the client in this way gives them insight into their personal situation, which is helpful for the relationship and creates a more engaging, transparent process in which value is gained throughout.
Of course, there are caveats. We need to embed AI with the care that the industry’s influence on client outcomes demands, alongside trusted models that reflect the firm’s process and proposition, using clean, accurate data.
Get that right and the ability to use generative and agentic AI to personalise the experience and remove the admin load is enormous.
The future of advice? An engaging process delivering demonstrable ongoing value, in which technology is a trusted partner at your side. Not an afterthought, or something you have to complete in order to get paid, but something that adds value throughout the process: supporting the client, providing reassurance when you aren’t in the room and unlocking huge capacity in your business.
Ben Goss is CEO of Dynamic Planner