Financial Planner Life Podcast

Your client is moving abroad: can a UK financial adviser still help, or do they now need an international financial adviser who specialises in expat financial advice and cross-border financial planning? Mike Yuille, CFP, International Financial Planner, joins Sam Oakes on Financial Planner Life overlooking Camps Bay in Cape Town to explain how cross-border advice works, and why it matters to financial advisers and financial planners in the UK.

WHO IS MIKE YUILLE?
Mike Yuille is a CFP and International Financial Planner who lives in France and works under licences in the UK...

Somebody offers you a life changing sum for the financial planning business you have spent 20 or 30 years building. Surely you take the highest offer? Henry Blunt thinks that instinct is one of the most damaging things in the market.

Sam Oakes is joined by Henry Blunt, acquisitions director at Wren Sterling. Before moving in-house, Henry ran a brokerage where he completed more than 140 deals, and he has worked on 30 more since joining Wren Sterling. He is also the first to say that the roughly 500 deals that fell through along the way taught him more than the ones...

Learn more about White Cliff Financial

Most people find their way into financial planning later in life, often at the end of another career. Hayleigh Griffiths found it in her mid-twenties, after asking the adviser she was doing social media for how to build her own wealth, and hearing that it was exactly what he did for a job.

Sam Oakes is joined by Hayleigh Griffiths, a self-employed financial planner at White Cliff Financial, a St. James's Place partner practice. Hayleigh moved from social media into an executive assistant role inside an advice...

Join The Openwork Partnership: 👉 https://fpl.partners/Openwork-MikeJane-pod

How do you grow a financial advice business by buying firms from advisers who are ready to retire, and still build a succession plan for your own?

In this Financial Planner Life podcast, Sam Oakes speaks with husband and wife Mike and Jane Saunders, who run Arrowe Financial on the Wirral, about self-employment, acquiring financial advice businesses and growing a mortgage, protection and wealth firm within The Openwork Partnership.

Mike was working six days a week as a wealth manager at Abbey National, and Jane was...

How do you become a financial adviser on a salary, without the financial risk of going self-employed? Jason Howard, Founder & CEO of Insight Associates, and Greg Ryan, Performance Director at Insight Associates, join Sam Oakes on Financial Planner Life to explain how they train, pay and mentor new financial advisers and financial planners, and why 37% of their advisers are under 30.

Find out more about Insight Associates

Jason started in financial planning in 1989, commission only, and ended up in hospital. When he went it alone in 2001, the man he had joined turned out to...

Find out more about Aberdeen Adviser: https://fpl.partners/aberdeen-adviser
Connect with Derek Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-smith-b687721/

Why does the financial advice process still take seven systems and seven hours? Derek Smith, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Aberdeen Adviser, joins Sam Oakes on Financial Planner Life to explain what is broken for UK financial advisers and financial planners, who is to blame, and how AI could fix it.

A financial adviser finishes a client meeting and then starts typing. The same details go into seven different systems, and roughly...

Learn more about The Openwork Partnership 

How do you move from employed administrator and paraplanner to self-employed financial adviser, business owner and appointed representative of The Openwork Partnership?

In this Financial Planner Life podcast, Sam Oakes speaks with Rose Hawkins, founder of Pebble Rose Wealth, about financial adviser training, self-employment and building a financial planning business within The Openwork Partnership network.

Rose joined the first Openwork Partnership Route to Principal cohort intending to buy the practice she had worked in since she was 18. A succession plan was being discussed, funding was a...

Learn more about the St. James's Place Academy

When a financial adviser retires, their clients do not retire with them. Somebody has to be ready to pick up those relationships, and the profession is not currently producing enough people to do it.

Sam Oakes welcomes back Gee Foottit, who leads the St James’s Place Academy, the longest running adviser training programme in the profession, to talk through what has changed for 2026.

Almost 50% of financial advisers in the UK are over 50, and fewer than 30% are under 40. The Academy was built as a...

An adviser told Brian McLaughlin he was about to disengage 300 clients because he simply could not service them anymore. He did not want to. He just could not see another option.

Brian McLaughlin is the founder of Pillar Client Services, and he has spent 27 years in financial services, from Prudential through to Rathbones and Octopus. Two and a half years of MBA research took him inside around 250 IFA firms, and what he found was a time problem dressed up as a client problem.

Firms know they carry a tail of clients who cost more to...

A paraplanner sits down on a Monday morning to write one new business suitability report and loses most of the day to it. The document runs to 40+ pages. The client takes it home after a one hour meeting and, if we are honest, reads about five of them.

Sam Oakes is joined by Jack Sleator, co-founder of Templi and a former paraplanner and adviser who spent five years inside UK advice firms before he started building software for them. Jack went from a graduate admin scheme at a large Irish wealth manager, into paraplanning at a national...

Almost nobody in financial services can explain what an employee benefits consultant actually does all day, which is strange for a specialism that sits inside most of the big advice firms in the UK.

Sam Oakes is joined by Natalie Malone, who leads the Risk and Reward team within Titan Wealth's corporate division. Natalie has spent almost 17 years in this part of the profession, starting in junior support roles and working her way up to running a specialist team of healthcare and group risk consultants.

Her clients are businesses rather than individuals, so the people...

Financial planners are sitting on a confidence problem: a 70% opportunity gap when it comes to closing, and it is costing them business they should be winning.

Chris Larkin, founder of training consultancy BigRock, returns to the podcast alongside Mark Rockliffe, CEO of Pembroke Financial Planning, to unpack what is really behind that number and what Pembroke has done differently over the past 12 months, growing from around 80 to 170 people along the way.

BigRock's Advisor Advantage diagnostic tool, completed by hundreds of Financial Planner Life listeners, found this audience scoring 48% higher than the industry average on protecting...

Jeanne Mpondo asked a room full of women in London whether anybody there was investing in anything. Not one hand went up. She then asked who owned their home or held a pension, and hands went up all over the room.

Jeanne Mpondo is a St. James's Place partner running her own practice in London, and a former senior data analyst at S&P Global. She came into financial planning by accident, after helping her uncle raise the funding for long term care.

She talks to Sam Oakes about coming through the St. James's Place...

 Towards the end of her ten years in law, Imogen worked out that fifteen hour days for three and a half months would get her to the billable hours she needed for her bonus. She did it, hit the number, and then handed in her notice. 

Sam Oakes speaks to Imogen Winfield, Paraplanner and soon to be qualified financial planner at City Gate Financial Planning, about the five month career break that became a complete change of profession. 

Imogen spent a decade at a US law firm, qualifying into lit...

Rebecca Ellis became a Chartered Fellow in her early twenties, but becoming a financial adviser wasn’t her immediate next step.

Today, she is Head of Advice at Titan Wealth International in Dubai, with experience spanning technical financial planning, paraplanning, international advice, operations and leadership.

In this episode of the Financial Planner Life Podcast, in partnership with Titan Wealth, Sam Oakes speaks with Rebecca about her career journey and the range of opportunities available within financial planning.

Rebecca initially studied accounting and finance at university before switching to a financial planning de...

After 13 years inside a financial advice network, Wayne Griffith and One Financial Solutions have become directly authorised by the FCA.

But what does it really take to become a directly authorised financial advice firm? How long does FCA authorisation take, what are the risks, and when is the right time to leave a network?

Wayne joins Sam Oakes on the Financial Planner Life Podcast to share the full story behind One Financial Solutions becoming directly authorised.

The process took around 18 months, including nine months of preparation followed by a demanding nine-month FCA application...

Trevor Greetham, Head of Multi-Asset at Royal London Asset Management, still measures market timing with a clock face borrowed from a 1930s newspaper. 

The idea dates back to a reference Trevor found from the London Evening Standard, a clock face marking out stages of the economic cycle: recession, recovery, late cycle, slowdown, each paired with the assets that historically perform well there. The problem, he explains, is that confirming exactly where you sit on that clock in real time is nearly impossible. Recessions are usually only confirmed months after they start, by which point markets have already m...

Think about it like Netflix, but for CPD. That's how David Tait, of Redmill Advance, describes the platform he's built for financial advisers, back on this week’s episode to talk through it. 

Rather than static articles followed by a handful of multiple-choice questions, the platform's content is genuinely interactive: cards to flip, embedded videos you have to engage with, and many tests to work through along the way, specifically so advisers actually retain what they've studied rather than just logging hours.

Firms can also automate the rollout of mandatory training across the year, spreading mod...

Laura Fordham's (Financial Adviser at Titan Wealth) route into financial planning wasn't planned. She spent her first year handling the job entirely alone, while her client bank was still small. She lays out exactly what that year looked like in conversation with Sam Oakes this week

Laura Fordham's route into financial planning wasn't planned. She started out on maternity cover in an admin role at Barclays Wealth, and it was proximity to the financial planning job , printing client packs and greeting people in the office, that first got her curious about the profession. From there she trained...

Lewis Prosser has spent years myth-busting what it takes to go chartered. He is joined this week by David Tait of Redmill Advance.

Lewis runs the St. James's Place programme supporting advisers from Level 4 through to Chartered status, and one of the most common myths he encounters is the assumption that becoming a Chartered Financial Adviser requires five years of experience, specifically as a financial adviser. 

Interestingly, Lewis has  never advised a client himself, yet he’s chartered, a fellow across three professional bodies, and holds a master's degree in finance. In this conversation, alongside Davi...

Hardy Michel is the founder of Marloo, an AI tool for financial advisers, and one of the most unusual things you'll hear him say as a tech founder, is that he'd rather you didn't sign a long-term contract for AI - even though it works against him commercially!

Spending years working behind the scenes at retail investing platforms, Hardy Michel watched the same pattern play out again and again: people wanting to do the right thing with their money, then panicking and getting it wrong the moment markets got volatile. That observation, more than any grand plan...

Natalie Cheesman, Partner at St. James's Place, joins Sam Oakes to talk about how she built a financial planning practice to £6 million in funds under management in 18 months, without ever fully stepping away from the mortgage business she'd run for 15 years. In this episode, Natalie explains why a transactional mortgage career, however loyal her 1,200-client bank was, left her wanting something more predictable, and what it actually took to build financial planning on top of it rather than instead of it.

Natalie talks through passing the CII Investment Advice Diploma in under a year while still running t...

Dan Hobbs, CEO at New Leaf Distribution, joins Sam Oakes to talk about what building their own podcast has delivered for an IFA Network. He's joined by his father, Founder & Chairman of New Leaf Distribution, Mark Hobbs, whose own scepticism about podcasting turned around once it started outperforming close to £1,000,000 spent on Google Ads." In this episode, Dan and Mark explain why Mark was initially convinced podcasting was a gimmick, and what it took for Dan to change his mind. They talk about why New Leaf deliberately avoided the well worn topics every other network already covers, choosing instead t...

Dan Armitage (CEO of Neuro Sparks) and David Tait (Founder of Redmill Advance,) joins Sam Oakes to talk about supporting neurodivergent individuals in financial planning. Dan spent a decade as a regulated financial adviser, as well as a bank manager in his early twenties, before founding Neuro Sparks with his mother three years ago. He lives with ADHD, dyslexia and dyscalculia himself, and that experience now shapes every part of how he trains other financial planners.

In this conversation, Dan explains what it was like navigating a career in financial services before he had the language for...

Matthew Samuel, UK Chartered Financial Planner and SEC Regulated Financial Planner at Titan Wealth International, has built a career across both the UK and the international market, specialising in advising clients with US connections and US assets from his base in Dubai.

He holds his UK chartered status alongside the Series 65 qualification, which makes him a registered investment adviser under the SEC, the US regulator. That means he can advise American expats living anywhere in the world, UK pension holders based in the US, and anyone navigating assets across both jurisdictions. It is one of the most...

What does it take to leave a secure career, become self-employed and build a financial planning business managing close to £40 million in just three years?

In this episode of the Financial Planner Life podcast, Sam Oakes speaks with Samantha Wood, founder of Wood Mitchell Financial Planning and a Partner at St. James’s Place.

Samantha’s career began in the British Army, where she progressed from soldier to officer and developed the discipline, leadership and adaptability that would later shape her career in financial services.

After leaving the military, Samantha moved into investment manag...

Romany Youell, Founder of The Finance Woman, qualified as the UK's youngest ever financial adviser at 18 after dropping out of college at 16. By 24 she had built a £10 million financial planning business. But the journey between those two moments nearly broke her.

In this episode of Financial Planner Life, Sam Oakes sits down with Romany to hear the full story. How she grew up going to client meetings with her dad from the age of 11. How she dropped out of college at 16 and qualified as a mortgage adviser before most of her peers had finished their A-levels. How Q...

Aycan Richards, Chartered Financial Planner at Titan Wealth, spent 13 years building a financial planning career across Qatar and Dubai before making the decision to sell her business and hand her clients over to Titan Wealth.

In this episode of Financial Planner Life, Sam Oakes sits down with Aycan to find out what that journey actually looked like. How she moved to Qatar in 2013 with a seven-year-old daughter and no existing client base. How she built trust from scratch using a referral-first approach that eventually became the foundation of a business worth selling. What it meant to be...

Most financial advisers already know they should be more active on LinkedIn. What they don't know is why what they're doing isn't working.

Free LinkedIn Webinar - book here -  http://www.leadgenfs.co.uk/fpl    

It's not the content. It's not the consistency. It's who they're connected to, what they're saying in messages, and whether they've ever stopped to define exactly who they're trying to reach. Get those three things wrong and LinkedIn produces nothing. Get them right and, as Louis Adkins puts it, consistent inputs get consistent outputs.

In...

Why 30 to 39 Is the Best Age to Become a Financial Adviser 

Is 30 too old to start a career in financial planning?

A lot of people would say yes. The reality is the opposite.

The 30 to 39 age group is the fastest growing cohort entering financial planning right now, up 13% according to fresh FCA data. And the average age of a financial adviser in the UK isn’t 56, like most people assume. It’s 48.

In this episode, Sam sits down with John Somerville, Director of Financial Services at the London Institute of Banking and F...

What's the best age to become a financial planner?

Adele Cable changed career at 53, convinced she was nearly on the ‘scrapheap’. Victoria Cable started at 23, convinced nobody would trust someone her age with their finances. Together they've built a practice worth £2.8 million in three years, and Victoria's own business is already valued at £400,000 after just a year and a half.

This week on Financial Planner Life, Sam is joined by an extraordinary mother-and-daughter duo from Advanced Wealth Management at St James's Place to share exactly how they got here, what they've learned, and why the age qu...

Care costs up to £100,000 a year. 1 in 4 people in the UK sell their home to pay for it. And most financial planners are having the conversation far too late.

Click here for the KareHero Website 

In this episode, Sam sits down with Stephanie Leung, founder and CEO of KareHero, a UK-based service helping families navigate the care system and access funding they did not know existed. Stephanie has been a carer since the age of 14. She left a C-suite career at Uber managing 20 countries across Europe, and built KareHero after her father became se...

Should UK financial planners be looking at the international advice market? Andreas Hollas has spent 13 years in Dubai building expertise that has no textbook, and the career it's given him is unlike anything available in the UK.

In this episode of Financial Planner Life, Sam sits down with Andreas Hollas, chartered financial planner and technical advice director at Titan Wealth International, to explore what international financial planning actually looks like, the clients, the cases, the complexity, and the career opportunity most UK advisers don't even know exists.

Andreas came straight out of university into financial...

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Only 39% of UK adults trust financial services. 

For a profession built entirely on trust, that number should be a wake-up call.

In this episode of Financial Planner Life, Sam sits down with Chris Larkin, founder and MD of Big Rock, a consultancy that has spent 22 years helping advisory firms across the UK build better client relationships, drive organic growth, and create the kind of experiences that make clients stay, refer, and trust you with everything they have.

Chri...

Hannah Wooldridge isn't only the person keeping Financial Planner Life running behind the scenes. She's also training to become a financial planner, and sharing every step of the journey in real time.

In this episode, Sam sits down with Hannah for the second update in an ongoing series following her path from a complete beginner to a qualified financial planner. She's one exam down, five to go, and already doing things most trainees don't think about until they're qualified.

They dig into what it actually felt like to sit her R01 after 11 years away from...

For most financial planners, the point of entry into the industry is either from an adjacent field or by working up from admin through paraplanning roles.

But not Tim. His route stands out as unconventional, but it's far from hindering his professional success. 

Law school. A year in Swansea chasing training contracts that never materialised. A sales recruitment firm. And then, a client engagement role at a financial planning firm in Cheltenham, a job he recruited for without really knowing the industry. 

On day one, his main question was: What exactly is financial pl...

75% of financial advisers lose their AUM when a client passes away. 

Not because of bad performance. Not because of high fees. Simply because nobody built a relationship with the next generation.

Ben Mason from Kinvault did something about that. 

In this episode of Financial Planner Life, Sam sits down with Ben Mason, the founder of Kinvault, to discuss the technology he built to address one of the most overlooked risks in financial planning: intergenerational wealth transfer. Ben explains why AUM walks out the door on death, why families are being failed at...

Most financial planning firms have both a financial planner and an investment manager. Far fewer have a team that operates as a single unit, with a shared philosophy, clearly defined roles, and a consistent client experience regardless of who's in the room or where the client happens to be.

In this episode of Financial Planner Life, Sam sits down with George Davey (Financial Planner) and Matt Beddall (Regional Managing Partner) from Titan Private Wealth, to discuss what that kind of partnership looks like in practice and why it makes such a difference for the clients they work...

Should technical professionals go freelance immediately or start as employed advisers? Alwyn Van Staden's journey offers a fresh perspective on entering financial planning from a technical background.

In this episode of Financial Planner Life, we chat to Alwyn about his strategic career path from investment management to financial advice. Despite having deep technical knowledge and years of experience at major firms, Alwyn made a choice to join St. James's Place as an employed adviser instead of going independent immediately.

The result? He's now managing over £150 million in client assets as an independent adviser w...

Frazer James aren't looking for every candidate. They're looking for A++ people.

Check out the jobs and book a meeting with James Mackay today!!

And if that's you, or if you’re also interested in attracting some of the industry’s best talent, then this episode was made for you.

In this week’s episode of Financial Planner Life, Sam Oakes is joined by James Mackay, co-founder of Frazer James, to find out what a firm that's serious about attracting exceptional talent actually looks like from the inside.

James and Ch...