Holly's takeaways from the Boring Money Conference 2026

Let’s start with our clients.

There are 18 million investors in the UK now – younger, with an average age of 49 and with higher average balances of £140k. There are also more beginners than ever – 24% of all investors have been investing for three years or less. Over this time, the S&P 500 has gone up by over 80%. That’s their normal…(gulp).

Despite the new activity, there are Gaps aplenty. The Advice Gap is high – 14.6 million people – and the Gender Investment Gap is over £574bn – that’s about the GDP of Ireland. So how do we tackle this?

If we’re going to get more people to invest, we need to deliver what they value. Here’s the interesting thing. People value trust. We know from our site that people seek out validation and they look for judgement – 49% of all our visitors look for awards, opinion or comparison. AI cannot deliver that. So let AI do the things consumers are using it for – product evaluation and comparison, for example. And put more effort into understanding – and delivering – the trust part of the value equation.

Banks and the Advice Continuum 

Against the Advice Gap backdrop, the banks are developing out the advice continuum. Guidance can do a lot more of the heavy lifting than people realise. AI can guide people into a Targeted Support journey, and simplified advice can deal with more specific issues, such as inheritance.

HSBC’s Emma Tilt talked about how the app becomes our Copilot:

As for simplified advice, JP Morgan Personal Investing’s James McManus thinks it will be “phenomenal” at tackling specific needs which are one step up in complexity from those you can sort with guidance.

On AI, he flagged that we haven’t yet had a big collective scare moment on personal data and trust – he thought that a confidence-rocking moment was inevitable: 

Affluent advised clients are using AI today 

Our Head of Research, Elwira Costello, surprised people with a data set on AI usage amongst advised clients. Guess what? Use of AI for financial information is most common amongst advised clients with £1 million or more. It made sense when she reminded us that many more affluent people have run businesses or been entrepreneurs – of course they are testing and using AI to see what it’s made of!

Traditional advice firms can service more clients by deploying AI smartly to create more people time. Targeted Support is a slow burn, and Steven Levin from Quilter recalled,

Helen Lovett, Group Managing Director of Foster Denovo, has embedded AI in much of their workflow and customer journeys. She had an interesting take on a more social aspect of AI, observing that AI usage is typically individual whereas financial planning (if applicable) should be done and discussed as a couple. So true. I don’t want anyone looking at what I ask Claude! She’s also looking carefully at tokenisation, reminding us that this is heading our way.

Be digitally curious

Our AI speaker Andrew encouraged us all to be digitally curious. To use AI in our own lives and test and learn. He told me to get Claude to interview me. Gulp. Advisers can ask LLMs for feedback on their plans and recommendations. Our clients will do it, so we may as well see what they’re being told.

On the pace of adoption, he thinks it’s less than 2 years until trust in these models increases to the extent that people will trust AI to deliver advice on more complex issues such as IHT, despite the lack of regulation or oversight.

That notwithstanding, as we consider the value of trust, judgement and validation, he said something which stuck with me. “Make the guardrails the product”. I think those are five words for every regulated business to really think hard about. 

The power of the personal 

Our sponsor, Communify, showcased personalised communications and how plug-and-play components can deliver very different customer experiences for less confident DIYers and more affluent advised clients, using the same tech stack. Their client and new entrant TechnoWealth, led by former Rathbones boss Rupert Baron, showed how AI can create a customer ‘balance sheet’ in 90 seconds, reading a stack of uploaded documents such as P60s and bank statements. That’s smart.

FCA tick for Targeted Support and a question mark for CCI 

Kate Blatchford-Hick from the FCA was positive about the 10 firms authorised for Targeted Support so far and cited early success metrics from the 5 which have gone live. Royal London has seen that customers are 60% more likely to open a S&S ISA after receiving Targeted Support vs an execution-only journey, and Monzo has also reported that their Targeted Support users were 33% more likely to open an investment account. 

She was more philosophical on CCI, coming our way on 8th June next year. The FCA is clear that it wants firms to go further in simplifying complex language and difficult fee illustrations. The industry is grappling with this. I thought it was interesting what she cited on how the FCA will judge success: both readability and intelligibility (currently only 6% of existing PRIIPs KIDs were found to be written in plain English). If that’s how they’re measuring it, is this not a good steer for firms on how they might be measuring it?

She reminded the room that the FCA is not there to try to trip people up:

Get your Gogglebox on 

Finally, we watched the new Invest for the Future TV ad which I am told hit TV screens during Gogglebox on the 12th October. Barclays Wealth boss Sasha Wiggins chaired this IA-led group and told me the key goal in the first year is just to get people to talk about investing to normalise it.

Inside the Barclays fold, she is focused on getting more people to invest along a continuum, reminding me of their move to slash fees on the DIY investing platform. She’s also reviewing AI with big plans to offer advice along the continuum and firmly rejects the notion that AI will lead to job cuts.

Thanks to all our speakers, to our sponsors Communify and to our hosts Schroders, for a wonderful day at Investing Rewired.