Rebecca Williams, divisional lead for financial planning at Rathbones, explores how financial advice is evolving for younger generations. She shares candid insights on industry challenges, the importance of authentic client relationships, and the role of technology in retention. Listeners gain a fresh perspective on bridging generational gaps, fostering diversity, and building trust in a rapidly changing financial landscape.

Welcome back to the Growth Workshop Podcast with myself, Matt Best, and as ever, the wonderful Jonny Adams, for a continued discussion with Rebecca Williams, divisional lead for financial planning at Rathbones. If we look at and I'm not picking out Rathbones In particular, but rathbones and your peers in this market, the instinct if we walked out on the street here in London and asked a bunch of Gen Z's and said, What do you know about financial planning, like, what do you know about about the health of your financial future? What do you know about investments and what are you doing? What do you think, I mean, I'm putting you on the spot here. Yeah, that's, that's a potential, I mean. And also, I guess, the follow up question to that could be, you know, do they recognize these brands? Do they recognize the brands that responsible currently in the market for a lot of that wealth management?

I mean, perhaps not. I think that that Gen Z and the younger generations are very interested in their finances. I think it would be wrong to say that they're not interested in that they don't want to learn. I worry slightly about some of the influences on them, though, and where they're getting their information from. I think that's really important. So making the industry more accessible, we want more Gen Z, there are more people to want to be in financial services, to grow the diversity, so that you've got more representation. Like I said, we've got a grad scheme. We've also got an apprentice scheme this year as well. So we're looking at people who don't want to go to university, absolutely fantastic candidates, like we've got some really amazing people joining us, just getting those into the industry. And then they're communicating with their peers and passing on messages in that way, you know, in a way that I can't do or they don't want to listen to me, a bit

like my daughter, which is very daughter, which is fair enough. And then that, the other thing that we're trying to do internally as well, so we have done for a very long time is financial awareness courses. So we've got one for 18 to 25 year olds. So it's designed for anyone can register, actually, but it's designed really, for clients. We, you know, talk to them about, what do your kids know about finance, you know, and it's, you know, kind of fundamentals, 101, type stuff. We've been doing that for a while, so, you know, encouraging some kind of education that way. But I think you're right. There's a lot more to do in terms of engaging, engaging with younger generations. I think that is something the industry should be talking about more. We're talking a lot about women and the transfer of wealth at the moment, but this is equally important, because they have the money challenges that they have. You know, are a lot different to ours. They're very different to

grandparents generation. And you know, like I said, if you're, if you're a millennial now, and you're coming, you've got, you're paying off your student debt, you're desperately trying to get on the property ladder, or you've got a crippling mortgage, you've got a couple of kids, so you're paying horrific nursery fees. I mean, they were bad when I was paying them, but they're awful now. Then perhaps you, you know, you're thinking about school fees planning or, you know, saving for your retirement is like way over here in the background somewhere. And even my generation, Gen X, you know, the vast majority are woefully under prepared for retirement, because we're the generation that's kind of sandwiched now in between elderly parents that we're looking after, and you know, teenage children that are still on the books and probably will be for quite a long time.

Make some redundancies at home.

To retire, well, you need about 40 or 1000 a year, or for a couple to retire with a moderate lifestyle, and that's excluding like housing costs, so if you're still paying rent, that doesn't include that. So you're looking at a pension pot of 800,000 maybe somewhere around there to get that kind of if you're buying an annuity, that's a lot of money. And the state pension age is going up, up, up, and the number of workers are going down, down, down. And this is something that it's a real problem, not just for the industry, but for the government. I mean, it's a big, big challenge engage people in saving for retirement, because the shift is, this is more of a personal responsibility than it is a state. One a lot of younger people are saying, well, who knows whether there'll even be a state pension when I get to retirement. And how knows, you know, how old will I have to be to get it? Will I have to be in my 70s before I get that? Well, so being able to look

after yourself financially is so important, and starting as young as you can just gives you the best chance of doing that.

It does feel like that the government has absconded themselves of some essence of responsibility in the last number of years, and who's picking up the slack? Because we've spoken about this today broadly across other avenues, but you know, you're delivering a great service to 18 to 20 plus year olds, but they're your children of clients, and speaking openly there, but I can see that that view, but who, who is going to grasp this? And this might be a bit about how you see the future, because the way that you might want to leave your job, how do you want the industry to look because governments have scoundrels themselves on responsibility, regulator is basically creating a lot of people. Bureaucracy. But actually, is it helping customers and clients? How do we go out there and educate and support and how do you want to leave the industry in a decent view?

I think auto enrollment is great, but it's not enough. So that 8% is not enough. It needs to be more. So think they have made a start doing that. They need the contributions. Need to be more, which I appreciate is is difficult, because everyone's squeezed right now, employers and employees, we need to be having. They need to be almost making it a bit more coherent. So a lot of people are have got little pots everywhere. So we need to be teaching people about, you know, can you bring those pots together? Are you investing right? Are you just stuck in some kind of default fund that's not right for you. So we just need to, I think we need to build on a lot of that. The other thing I think the government needs to work on is not tinkering with things so much, like stop messing with stuff. I know we've got a huge black hole to fill. We've rolled out changes to major taxes, but that basically means that everything's on the table. So every year, without fail, we've

got endless rumors about what's going to change. Is tax free cash going you know, we're already seeing client inquiries, you know, I want to take my tax free cash. I'm worried that that even what you know, the the allowance is going to fall, or it's going to reduce. It means that the public are constantly suspicious of what's going on, of things are going to change, it makes them reluctant to save because they just don't know what's going to happen. And that is a big issue. So trust in the government is a big issue. So just just give us some stability, or gives people some stability in their savings, and that will go a long way to making them feel more confident. That in itself, is just deterring people, I think, from saving as far as legacy goes. If I can help at least one person in the way that Roger, my mentor, has helped me to succeed in this industry, that would be great. And I'd love to do that for lots of not just women, but, you know, for lots of the people that I

work with, I get a real kick out of seeing other people succeed. It's fantastic. So, so yeah, if I can help get a few more women into those senior positions, and...

Do you mind sharing a little bit about what Roger did help you with, or how that what that might look like? So I think that's a really interesting point that you raise.

When you have like that teacher at school that you just click with. It was, it's a bit like that. He, he was so supportive of me and my career was honest with me. So, you know, gave me really good feedback about where things needed to change. I think he really understood how I worked, and he knew how to get the best out of me. So he knew that if, if we had a one to one, and he gave me a pat on the back and told me I was doing really well, and picked out some, you know, basically, give me a round of applause. It's a bit like the cheerleading thing again. Actually, I would come out like, yeah, I've got this. And if things were not going well, you know, we were having difficult times and difficult conversations, you know, we usually were both early starters. So you'd be in the office, you know, we'd have a cup of sit down, have a cup of tea, and just, you know, you'd vent, or you'd discuss for half an hour, get it all out, and then you'd be like, Yeah,

okay, I'm shaking that off now, and I'm going to start my day. And he it wasn't just me. Everybody that he worked with had held him in such high esteem. He was, he was just calm and knowledgeable. I mean, he's just great, really. And even now, after he's retired, you know, we're still in touch. We still go for lunch. He's helped me recently with a few things, and you know, I can chat to him about, you know, challenges that I'm facing, or what I see for my career in the next kind of five years. And he's actually mentoring other people through the CISI mentoring scheme, so he's still sharing his love with everybody else, which is fab. And I think you just, you just get so much from a person like that who's just so inspirational that you just think, yeah, okay, maybe I, maybe I can do that too, which would be great.

Amazing. So this has been super, super interesting. It we've spoken about a number of topics today, and if we think about the opportunity that clients have in the industry, whether that's with organizations like rathbones or others, or any other avenue that they want to seek for financial advice, that there is a situation where they do have different options. And client retention from our conversations that Matt and I have in the industry is an important aspect. You know, retaining your clients is important for business growth. So how do you go about with your team to retain the clients that you've got? Is there certain things and practices that you put in place?

Do you know this was an interview question?

Really?

I've heard a lot of responses to this in the last few weeks. Actually, relationship is massive one, so it's building that rapport and that trust, because that's at the heart of it. That's what this is all about. So clients, I think, are fairly comfortable paying slightly more fees if they've got the right relationship, but that takes work, and it takes engagement. So. So, and it's so you you need to keep in touch with them. And it's not just, oh well, once a quarter, I might ping them an email or something, pick up the phone like so that really came through in some of the conversations that I'm having. Pick up the phone, even if just to say hi, or this is happening in the that you know, in the in the news. Have you heard about the rumors pre budget? You want to talk about anything really, really important, especially if they're paying an ongoing fee. We meet all our clients at least once a year. But that's not enough. You know, need to

be talking to clients. Need to be engaging them in in other ways. To keep that conversation going, you need to understand what's important to them. You can't walk into the meeting with your own agenda. You just you need to understand what's important to them today. How have their circumstances changed? What's playing on their mind, what do they want to talk about, and how you can help them get there. And so I think those things are really, really important. You know, client events. That's also a good, a good one. We do a lot of client events. Clients really like that, and they love, you know, we did an event at the Chelsea flower show this year. That's fantastic. I think ultimately, you'll see a lot in the industry that when a financial planner or an investment manager leaves a firm, they often take the relationships with them. So it's the strength of the relationship you have with that client that makes all of the all the difference when you're you know, when you're talking

to them, and if performance is down or something's not going right in the markets, you can have that conversation with a client that you've got trust and rapport with and say, Well, look, okay, it's not going so great in the markets at the moment, but our financial plan is built around you getting to these objectives, and we can still do that, because what we're planning for is the longer term, which, if you don't have that kind of relationship, and you're only as good As your last quarters investment figures. That's really, really difficult. So for me, the key is the relationship with the client.

And I'm talking probably about Matt here, the industry that you have been in for however many years you've worked in business, what we call is account development or retention, or client in just in business in general. And there's a really direct, really strong correlation between engagement and retention. And McKinsey brought a great article out in wealth management, most recently about the fact that we typically talk to our clients probably around about three times a year at the optimum, maybe less. What our clients want is 12 touch points.

That's interesting, 12.

Good quality touch points. It's not that quick ping of, hey, how you doing to fancy a chat? It's the, you know, it's the multi omni channel approach of different options that they go through. So I think that's a really great response. Is client retention comes back from engagement. But do you have any opinions? Because you've worked a lot in the industry about client retention, not only just outside of wealth management, but you've also worked with a lot of clients in terms of retaining clients, Matt.

Yeah. And I think I would agree on the relationship piece absolutely wholeheartedly. I think there's the it's a cliche, people buy from people, right? Or people buy people. But I think this industry in particular, along with many other services industries, that's really, really true. I think in some I sort of lived, I've sort of lived the journey with a couple of organizations as they've transitioned in the technology space from an old fashioned technology delivery model into the SaaS world, right? I know people will probably be familiar with SaaS or software as a service, but I think there are lots of challenges that that industry faced, that we faced at the time when it came to client retention, because what SaaS was all about was making it easier for clients to have choice. It made it more flexible. It made it easier for people to turn services on and off, right? That's what attracted clients in but what that did is it created uncertainty in terms of sort of

future forecasted revenue, but it also meant for businesses, but it also meant that the focus really had to steer towards the relationship with the client and the value that the client's getting. And I think one of the second thing you mentioned there, Rebecca, which I think is probably the most important thing, is focus. You said it in the in the context of the agenda. So the client sets the agenda. It's about the client. Yeah, I completely agree. We talk about them, us, we as the sequence of the way that we should think about any engagement with the client. Always think about them first, like, what's their priority? Because, frankly, otherwise, we might as well be talking to ourselves. But I think it's a it's a big challenge in this industry. It's big challenge in lots of industries, but particularly in this industry, where there's so much that needs to happen, that needs to be said, that that can sometimes distract planners and investment managers, wealth managers, from

actually, actually going back to what's important for the client, what the client wants. And that helps you create those meaningful engagements, those 12 engagements across the year, because you've got context. You always think, when I've sat down in the past and done account reviews with clients and they've turned around or with the internal team, they said, well, we just don't know the answer any of those questions. Well, first of all, that's fine, because we now know we need to go and find that out, but it's also a great indicator that, well, what have we been talking about in the last 25 meetings? Then, like, we've probably just been ramming product down their throats, right?

Yeah, it's a big misconception, isn't it, that this industry, you have to be a whiz at numbers and know everything about investment market. Kids, you don't, because I'm not like that. You have to be able to talk to people, understand people, and build relationships. That's the key. And I think when you're recruiting, that's one of the big, you know, kind of misconceptions, like, you don't need a mass or a sciency background to do this job. You just need to be a good people person.

And you look at the big institutions like Vanguard and other opera, you know that they're providing the number part, you know, to a lot of business where you can outsource at lower bips and make an optimized organization we are leading with advice now in this organization. And actually, the recruitment in the future wealth managers has to be around relation, relationship oriented individuals and identifying those capabilities. But just on this point about client retention, because that is going to be a proxy for growth for the for the industry. You've got experience in technology though, Matt, you know, what would be the things that businesses could do to retain what can they implement in their organization? I guess is my question from a technology stack perspective, specifically, maybe in financial services, to retain customers.

So I think I'm going to go with kind of power of threes. I think, I think first of all, you've got to recognize that this is a process. So you've got to have in place a bit of a process. And that doesn't mean you're ignoring the people so that you've because you've got a process. It's actually the opposite of that. So I talk a lot about, a lot about the governance that sits around this, because what that does is it helps everybody stay accountable to the task at hand and keeps everybody focused. It also means that you've got some repeatability and some scalability when it comes to the way that you engage with clients that is and how you engage them. So talk about quarterly business reviews in A, B to B type context, because that process sets out an opportunity to engage with the client. What you say in those quarterly business reviews then comes down to the skill of the individual. And I think then, if we think about the people, and we think about how they

show up, you talked about competencies, I think that's exactly right, recognizing what it is that you need out of the people who are serving your clients. Again, common misconception in tech is that you need to under completely understand the technology. I don't think that's true. I think actually you need to understand it enough to be able to communicate it in, as you said, plain English, to your client. But you don't need to be a developer. You don't need to be an expert in that, because there are other people in the business who can do that, and you can leverage that. You're the sort of conductor of the business around your client. And I think that's really important point in terms of success. And focusing on, on, on that is key. And then finally, I think it's, there's sort of, I mentioned the kind of process, but I think it's also the systems and the opportunity to create space for those engagements. It's, I was chatting to a prospective client, actually, of ours, just the

other day, talking about, you know, they were saying, Oh well, they'd like to focus on, on, you know, some of this other stuff, like, because, because there's things that can be, you know, that can distract them. Oh, well, I've got to now figure out how to use this system so I can put that report in this break down some of those barriers. Let's make it smooth. Let's allow as much time as possible to be spent with the client, not on all of the other stuff.

The golden time. Increase the golden time. And the golden time, is a proxy for client engagement. I thought you were going to tell us about the fact that building propensity models would be a really good solution in some of the technology stuff, but I gave you the opportunity. You didn't, you didn't answer it, because I put you on the spot. That would have been the fourth.

But that comes into the processes and the engagement, because you can't, you need to truly understand your client. But I think what John, if I correct me, if I'm wrong here, but the propensity model, or understanding the propensity for churn or for or flip it the other way, for retention is key as well, especially in an organization or in an industry where you've got individuals looking after large, large books of business, and I think you can't if you've got 250 clients, you can't serve them all equally. You also can't be across every single one of them all of the time. So developing those tools to help you in identifying where the risk might be coming from is a really great way, and that sits under that systems element as you think about things that can help us automate our way out of some of these challenges, or automate our way into some of the opportunity, actually, which is the other way of looking at it. So if you've got a client who's you

know, used to respond instantly to an email within a couple of days, all of a sudden, they're now taking three chaser emails that they go yo. There's a red flag they've just skipped to two review meetings or postponed a couple of review meetings. Red flag, letters of authority, massive. Red flag. I mean, argument. Some would argue that's too late, but there are lots of these triggers that we can use to identify potential risk.

But that's a really interesting moment, because what you've said there just reminded me that one of the other key things about client retention is understanding how they work and how they respond to things, or how they want you to respond to things, you know. So I've had clients who will read a suitability report, line by line, bring it in annotated with their questions. I know that that's going to happen, so I can totally prepare for that. We will have others who will just sign the forms and send them straight back. And they don't want all of the detail. They just want to understand why what they're doing is going to help them meet their goals. You've got to learn how to communicate with people and find out you know how best to engage with them. That's also really important, because how you like to be communicated to is not necessarily how you should be communicating with other clients

Exactly. And that comes back full circle to our conversation about technology. How do we use technology as a teammate to one? You know, it's actually a good thing to find the triggers, because a lot of clients don't want to go through the rigma of finding another organization to work within as a financial advisor. Actually, they typically just want to stay where they are because of the cost of change is quite high. But if we're able to build these models that you've described, I think that's a crucial way to retaining clients, because actually, they probably want to be retained and actually be fed the right information.

So we're going to start profiling our clients to find out how they learn.

How they might, we might, but we can definitely identify the triggers to seeing if they are about to move out, which is just great for the industry, I think.

These are sort of areas where AI can step in to help, to help handle some of that, that, you know, some of that additional work, and it all, but it all comes back to, I think, that original point around AI is that we're not substituting the human connection. It's technology as an enabler. It's technology as a partner, not technology as a replacement. Yeah. And I think that's really key, yeah, really important. Well, look, Rebecca, thank you so much for coming in wonderful a wonderful debate. I think we touched on some really important points there women in this industry, the change in the in in the profile of clients, the challenges that face the different generations when it comes to wealth and some political stuff in there as well. So thank you so much for coming in. We've really loved it and see you soon, hopefully.

Brilliant. See you soon.

Thank you. Bye.