The FCA’s Simplified Advice drive may help tackle the advice gap, but it’s technology, data quality and operational readiness that will determine whether firms can truly deliver accessible advice at scale. That’s the view of Jodie Gallagher, Head of UK IFA Product at FE fundinfo, as she explains in this exclusive opinion piece for IFA Magazine.
The FCA’s push to simplify financial advice is long overdue. Too many consumers have been effectively priced out of professional guidance for too long. The regulator’s current consultation is a genuine attempt to change that, creating the conditions for more accessible, proportionate advice to reach a much wider audience.
The direction is encouraging. Simplified advice trims away much of the exhaustive fact-finding that makes traditional advice models expensive to run, focusing instead on situational guidance tailored to what a client actually needs. Paired with the introduction of targeted support, which allows firms to make product suggestions based on shared consumer characteristics, the intent is clear: broader participation, without eroding the protections that matter.
What the proposals do not change, however, is the operational challenge of making any of this work at scale. Simplifying the advice process does not simplify everything behind it. If anything, it shifts where the complexity lives. When firms rely on fewer data inputs, each of those inputs carries more weight. The usability of client information becomes the critical variable.
The FCA’s move away from capturing everything “necessary” towards gathering what is “sufficient” is a meaningful one. It reflects how good advisers actually make decisions, and it points towards a more proportionate model of suitability. But it also places real responsibility on firms to define what “sufficient” looks like in practice, particularly how data is structured and applied across their systems.
For many firms, this demands a fresh look at how client profiles are built and maintained. A lot of what shapes an individual’s advice journey is unstructured, and the question of whether a client belongs in a simplified or more comprehensive service depends on two things that rarely come from the same place: their expressed attitude to risk, which tends to emerge from conversations and qualitative interactions, and their broader financial picture, which can increasingly be drawn together through platform integrations and account-level data.
Getting those two elements to work in concert across different tools and touchpoints is what allows advice to hold together as it scales. It also makes commercial sense. Lower-cost advice models live or die on efficiency, and that efficiency depends on data that does not require manual interpretation at every step. Where information is well-structured and flows cleanly through connected systems, advice becomes easier to standardise. Where it does not, the process becomes slower, costlier and harder to sustain.
None of this is a criticism of what the FCA is trying to achieve. The proposals are right, and expanding access to advice is one of the most important challenges the sector faces. But getting the rules right is only part of the work.
The firms that will genuinely benefit from this shift are those investing now in the infrastructure to support it. That means building connected data environments where information moves coherently from product manufacturers through to advisers and on to clients. It means validating data quality earlier in the process, before advice is delivered, rather than after. And it means thinking seriously about how adviser judgment can be translated into classification frameworks and decision boundaries that hold up consistently under Consumer Duty.
That last point is perhaps the most underappreciated opportunity in all of this. Firms that can genuinely embed adviser expertise into their data models and advice processes will not just be better placed for compliance. They will be building something more durable: a foundation for client trust that scales without losing its integrity.
