Jonathan Tweedie explores the future of financial advice, tackling industry challenges, the impact of technology, and the need for broader access. He examines how AI and digital platforms can personalize advice, the shifting responsibilities of employers and government, and the critical role of trust. This episode offers a candid look at how collaboration and innovation can reshape financial well-being for all generations.

to the Growth Workshop Podcast with myself, Matt Best and Jonny Adams, and continued discussion with Jonathan Tweedie from RBC Brewin Dolphin. Jonny, I recall conversation with one of those US firms just around what the government in the US are mandating in terms of, you know, in terms of its benefits and things that that need to be in place. You talk about corporates and the regulator so corporate, what are some of the things? And I know we're going to potentially open some cans of worms, but, but for me, there's, there's a couple of things here. There's a there's a there's a sort of, there's a bit of a kind of mandating what the future needs to look like. There's going to need to be some policy that helps drive that forward. But there's also needs to be that sort of willingness. So which of those things you think is going to happen fastest? Do you think it'll be corporate saying, You know what, this is a sufficient benefit for our employee base, that

actually we're going to provide financial we're going to provide a service that helps financial health of our employees? Or do you think it's more likely that the government will do something first?

I suspect they'll both happen at the same time. But my view, corporates are already starting to look at this and starting to understand that they need to make sure, from a fairly selfish point of view, that they get better at productivity if they can deliver a better working environment and less stress for the people. What stress is that out most of the time. It's working out. How we're going to pay the mortgage at the end of the month. You know how we're going to pay for kids, school fees, whatever it might be that's stressing you. We you know, as an as an employer, you want to, you want to remove that from your employees, and therefore, providing them with access to good and trusted advice is going to be crucial. And when, when you look at every employer today, who's mandated to provide pensions for their employees, making sure their employees understand the value of that pension, again, is hugely important to them, because it enables them to

make sure that their employees are are motivated to protect themselves and to protect their families. So I think employers will will drive this quite quickly and will demand it. I think that the reason I think government will do it at the same time is We're in a tight space financially. The government recognizes that they need to, they need to find ways of removing some of the costs from the state, and by by encouraging and potentially even mandating employers to have to give their employees access, not just to services, but to be advice may help them reduce some of that long term burden, but I think in order to get it right, the biggest challenge to the industry to do this today is for lack of alignment between the ombudsman and the regulator. And I think this is a big difference in the US, and they have a caveat environment, there is much less financial protection. I I'm not for one moment, advocating going there. I don't think it's good for I don't think it's good

for the majority of people. It's very good for for the minority. But what I what I do think they get right is they support that they are much more likely to recognize that bit that no one knows what tomorrow looks like. So when you are giving advice, you are not giving guarantees of things happening. You cannot give guarantees of things happening. You need to provide the education so people understand, people understand risk is what you need to educate them for you need somebody to recognize that if they are, if they are saving, they can afford risk in their early years, because statistically, they will be absolutely fine over length is but you need to draw down risk as you get close to the point where you actually need access to capital, so that you create an environment where people know how to accumulate and how To decumulate wealth. I don't think people understand that today, I look at my own family and go, they save safely because they're risk adverse. When I

go, actually, that's quite a high risk strategy, because it's unlikely to meet your your needs and objectives. You've got to know when you can afford to take risk, and you can afford to take risk when you've got time on your side.

Yeah, you said some fascinating points around your time in the in the army. You sort of teased us a little bit by saying the leadership course you did in Sandhurst, and I'll just do a bit of pre framing. We've supported a number of leaders within wealth management across the UK and the US, and we deliver commercial leadership support, so frameworks and tools that might help organizations grow or retain their clients, for example, but you reference it as leadership within Sandhurst. What's the difference? Do you think and if you had a chance to bring in one or two frameworks from your time at Sandhurst, what would they be into the corporate world, which you might have already done already.

So I think the biggest difference is you have to develop trust really quickly. I mean, effectively, let's, let's be really clear about what the military does. It takes very young men and asks them to put the young men, young people these days and ask them to put their life on the line by putting it into clear and present danger. And to do that, they're unlikely to do it for for king and country. They do it because they're protecting the person next to them and they trust the person who's leading them. So you've got to create an environment where your your junior leaders are trusted by their soldiers almost instantly. It's really hard to do, because when you leave sand test, you're not very good, and you need to recognize that you're not you're not the finished product, but you've had enough training and development to to be competent, and then you need to learn how to become good now I wasn't an infantry platoon commander. I disappeared straight out of

Sandhurst to Northern Ireland. I learned from listening to the people around me. The beautiful thing about being a young army officer, particularly in a combat zone, is the expertise you have around you is phenomenal. So you will have a platoon sergeant who's probably got 20 years of expertise of doing this, who you need to listen to, you need to understand, you need to involve in your decision making at all times. You'll have a company Sergeant Major, is even more senior, who will be able to bring in and give you advice. You've got your fellow officers, you've got your senior officers, it becomes a community which is there to support and build you, but on the ground, there's only one decision maker, and it's you, and you've got to be you've got to be decisive enough to be able to make those decisions, but to have drawn in enough information so that you understand the decision you're going to make, and then then agility that. So I think the other thing Sandhurst teaches you

is, is that old Mike Tyson quote, isn't it that everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face. You get punched in the face on a daily basis, and you have to adapt, and you need to be flexible in the way you in the way you adapt.

And we're not talking about war here in the corporate world, but we are talking about every day is different. You build a plan. You mentioned that earlier. There is proof. And also baked in opinion with the world that we work in, that traditionally, leaders in financial services have been recruited because they're good performers within their technical role, rather than potentially being out and out leaders, and then the development that they're providing is actually below par. What I'm hearing is Sandhurst may have actually had those individuals come from all different backgrounds. You might have not been an innate leader. That actually the training and the support you got given in the Sandhurst gave you the foundation. When we look in organizations, the leadership functions are some of the most critical roles towards transforming and changing, but they're actually some of the most under sort of developed people. Why?

Because, and again, think about the difference. So the military is able to to recruit people specifically because they are looking for leaders. I was not the best infantiere. I wasn't selected on my ability to be a great soldier. I was selected on my potential to be a great leader. And that's we don't do enough of that in industry. We we fall into the mistake of taking the very best car salesman and putting him in charge of running running the garage. That is often the wrong outcome. You are looking for different skill sets, and we need to get to a mature state within our businesses where I can have a conversation and go, Johnny, look, you are a brilliant salesperson. You don't you don't want to be encumbered by this bit of leadership, because you are more effective and adding more value for yourself and for your for your clients and your prospects in the role you're doing. Let's teach people how to coach for that. Because the bit I think that

we've probably got wrong is is we try and coach people to follow our own career paths quite often, and that's always a mistake. You've got to be able to coach people for what's right for them. And I don't think I was a particularly effective I was a terrible stock picker. I was an adequate investment manager. I was really good at building relationships with people I find, I found, when I moved into the leadership side of our business that really suited my temperament and it it suited my my sense of clarity about where I wanted to get to and and where I wanted our business to get to, and how I could sort of create a picture of what their sunny uplands looked like. And. Persuade people to follow me that is, that is a different skill set to being a phenomenal investment manager or a great financial planner. Yeah, it's one of those things where I think you just need to, I need to stop, and not just i Our industry needs to stop thinking about just because you're really

brilliant at one side of it. You're you're going to be an excellent leader in our industry. And I don't think my colleagues would mind me reflecting on the fact that our senior leadership team all, predominantly, all came particularly on the client facing side. All came through the client facing world. I don't think one of us would put our hands up and go, we were the best at that side of things.

This isn't just an industry challenge. This is a global challenge. Businesses do not recruit leaders. They recruit typically high performers in a previous role that might be income producing or technical individuals. And I loved your point about, you know, recruit the future leader. I think it's about identifying what are those capabilities. And you talk about agility as one of those things, but a lot of time, people then recruit the people that they want to recruit as well, versus actually having a decent, well built framework that you can recruit off. Because I'd imagine in the army, they have tendencies to recruit certain type of profiles.

Yes, and they're getting better at it, but and we're the same, yeah, it's really easy to fall into the trap of recruiting in your in your own image, isn't it? We do it all with bias, complete bias, and actually understanding the mix and the blend that you need to create a good leadership team. And I talked about military, leaders are never individuals. Leaders are always teams.

The sentence I always like to say when we're working with leadership groups is, as a leader, you're a reflection of your team. If you pull that mirror up, you don't see yourself. Who do you see? Exactly? It's your team. And even just saying absolutely, oh, really is that? Drop your ego at the door, that is the team that you're leading.

And you create followership in that team by creating trust and respect within that team and recognition, making sure that everybody is recognized for the contribution that they're making is is massively important.

I'd like to go back, Jonathan, you mentioned, you mentioned something about providing advice, and you the story you told about your son, and you know how, how what you were sharing with him or what he was seeing didn't feel relevant or appropriate to him. The other thing, of course, in all of this is where technology can help support and reach in that market, because we can't wait for this educational change to happen at school level, because otherwise we're 50 years away from the problem. We've got to find a way to reach those soon to be retirees or soon to inherit wealth, and we've got to be able to reach those who are coming into that, you know, 18, early 20s, or even in their, you know, in a sort of later stage of life. So what's your view on how technology and perhaps even AI can help reach well, help make, make your business or this industry's business, is more effective, but then also help reach this this audience better.

I think what AI enables us to do is to compound information, compound data, and drive better decision making as a result of it, if you can then use that ability to group clients into segments, to be able to talk to them about the sorts of decisions they need to be able to make, and to be able to deliver that to them in a digital format at pace, at a very low cost you start to solve problems and AI enables us to reduce the cost massively because all of that information, all of that data, is not being crunched by a room full of associates, it is being crunched by a machine in seconds. Now the trick is then attaching the output to the brand and making sure your brand has the trust it needs and it's relevant to the people that you're trying to talk to. And I think this will be our challenge as an industry, is to focus on on the brand and the relevance. So how do you take that information and communicate to the people you're trying to provide the advice or support

to to get that right, you've got to stop thinking about you, and you got to start thinking about them and how they want to consume it. So I reflect on our own and not just ours. By the way, the entire industry writes wonderful reports for clients today, but they're nearly all focused on the information we need to give to the client, and how to protect and caveat all the advice you're giving to them, whereas actually what I think AI will enable us to do is to create an environment where we can develop the advice specifically for you and. We can show you what it looks like in your world, in the way you think. So we talked about a little bit earlier on, and said, when we talk about how we plan for our wealth journey, and by the way, No one plans for their wealth journey, but, but when people, when people are in that environment, they we always talk to them about risk, and when I talk about risk, what we actually mean is standard deviation. Now I start talking to us

about standard deviation, they close open I haven't got a clue what you're talking about. And why would that be remotely relevant to me? We need to be able to convert stories into understandable dialog for individuals. So you take whatever is relevant to them, and you take their story, and you take their experiences, and then you try and put that into the context of them. Well, what do I mean by risk? How do you make decisions in your everyday life, which are actually about how you take risk and how you view risk. And then how do I show you what that looks like in in the world of investments? And then why you need to be able to adjust your thinking on that as time progresses.

I love it. It's purely customer centric, which is where the industry can go and should go. And the last sort of question, with all this evolving potential change, we've, we've worked together, we've known each other for a number of months as a business and as people, which is lovely, where does consulting fit into this? Because, you know, you've, you've got change on the horizon. It may or may not be appropriate. Businesses may be able to do all of this amazing change that we've discussed. But do you have an opinion on that?

Yeah, so I do. I think, I think our industry, in fact, industry in general, uses consultancy in two ways. The first way, I think, is fundamentally wrong, but is used probably the most regularly, which is simply to validate decisions, so that you abdicate responsibility for the decision you make by bringing in a consultant to to effectively support your thinking and ideas to go. It's all right, the consultant said this was absolutely the right way to go, and no one ever gets fired for for doing that. I think the way we try and use consultants, and the way I think they add real value is when you you recognize that they can actually bring a skill set that you don't have, and they can help you think through what the problem is, think about the outputs you're trying to achieve, and then challenge and challenge all the time, and push you to make the decisions that are going to take you outside of your natural comfort zone, so that they they always fill the empty

chair within your within your boardroom, and create that environment where they're pushing pushing you to think differently. And I really admire that in the consultants we work with. I find it refreshing when I come away from talking to consultants and go, oh yeah, they took me to the edge of where I was comfortable and then pushed me a little bit further, because that just encourages me to go away and think more about it, to start reflecting on the fact that actually, we are always going to have to push the boundaries of what we're trying to do.

Brilliant.

How do we learn best? Lucky enough, I disappeared off to Oxford and did their executive leaning leadership thing. I learned two things, probably a pretty expensive two things to learn. The first one was never built force, which is always about pivoting the moment you build yourself a fort. You put yourself into an environment where you can't change your mind because you're you're rigid and stuck to one space, so you should just avoid it at all costs. You always create an exit so you can move. And the other one was, we learn best not by consuming information, but by conversation. Every time you talk with people, you you're actually thinking about what they're saying to you and going every conversation I have, I look at somebody, go educate me, teach me how you're thinking and teach me why you're thinking that way, because it will challenge my thinking. So learning through conversation was a crucial part of that.

We always say that from these sessions, we've, we've done this 23 times now, every time I come away from this, like today, even the points those last two or I listen back, you know, just to hear more about what the guests say, I've learned more from this podcast, and may I say, probably than seven years of consulting. You know, because it's the same you know that the things that you learn through conversation, or even as a consultant, when you're working with a client, you learn actually things from the client side as well by through conversation.

Yeah, because it's easy, isn't it? It's completely immersive behavior. When you're having a conversation with somebody you are, you're always thinking about what they're saying to you and and how that impacts you, and then you're normally trying to express how you feel about that to them. That's a much better environment to learn in, and it resonates and sinks in because that person's then trying to put information into. To into a into a language in a context that you'll understand.

Brilliant. Jonathan, thank you.

Yeah, it's an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me along.