The Financial Advice Summit 2026 – by Chris Baigent-Reed

Every advice firm is being told the right technology will change everything. Far fewer are being shown how to make it work on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, when an adviser has back-to-back reviews, a paraplanner is chasing a provider for valuations and nobody quite trusts the data in their practice management solution.That gap was the thread running through the Role of Tech panel at The Financial Advice Summit. I was delighted to sit alongside Aveni, intelliflo and Dynamic Planner, with Jane Hodges keeping us on track from the chair.

Built from the ground up

The panel was the final stage of TFAS’s TechForward programme, which Jigsaw Tree has supported since it launched in June. TechForward was designed to close the gap between knowing what technology could do and actually making it happen inside an advice firm.

It started with a focus group of TFAS member firms, which we facilitated, followed by a webinar and the summit panel. Every stage was shaped by what advisers told us, not by a theoretical framework or a vendor roadmap. As Richard Ardron at TFAS put it at launch, advisers are not short of people trying to sell them technology. What they are short of is practical guidance.

Three things advisers told us

The encouraging headline is that firms are thinking about technology the right way round. The TechForward research found 88% of advice firms put client outcomes at the centre of their technology strategy. But three themes came through again and again.

1. Firms want more from what they already have. Advice firms are becoming more proactive about technology, but the instinct isn’t to buy the next shiny thing. It’s to get full value from the systems they’ve already paid for. In our experience, most firms use a fraction of what their practice management and planning tools can do.

2. Integration is still the biggest barrier. Systems that sit side by side are not the same as systems that work together. Every manual re-key, every spreadsheet bridging two platforms, is a cost, a risk and a drain on the people doing it.

3. Advisers want AI, with boundaries. Appetite for AI is high, but advisers want clear limits on what it can act on and a full audit trail of what it has done. That’s not reluctance. That’s professionalism. The panel agreed AI isn’t about to replace advisers, but it will replace a great deal of the work some of their teams currently do.

What makes tech work better every day

After many years’ experience of reviewing technology in advice firms, I’ve seen the same pattern many times. The technology is rarely the problem. What decides whether it delivers often comes down to the people and processes built within it. What’s needed?

• Understand the problem you are looking to solve and be clear on how any tools that are being reviewed can do that.  Speak to other firms using the solution and take lessons from their experiences.
• Clean, trusted data. AI and automation only amplify what’s already there. If your client records are incomplete or duplicated, no tool will fix that for you. Data first, always.
• Processes designed before systems are configured. Map how work actually flows through your firm, including the workarounds, before you decide what the technology should do. Then simplify before configuring, a complex process replicated in any technology isn’t the answer.
• A stack that integrates. Judge every new tool by how it connects to what you already have and be clear on where the data flows, not just by its demo.
• People who’ve bought in. Adoption is a habit, not a launch event. Involve your team early, give them a reason to change and support them well past go-live.
• The right team for the job. Most firms don’t have spare capacity to run a transformation alongside the day job. Be honest about where you need help.

Where to start

If you take one thing away make it this: before you buy anything new, ask what it would take to make what you already have work properly.

Thank you to TFAS for convening TechForward, to my fellow panellists, and to every firm that shared its experience in the focus group. Professional Adviser’s write-up of the session is here.

If you’d like to talk through where your firm is on its technology journey, and what would make the biggest difference on your Tuesday afternoons, please get in touch.

We’d love to help. Book a discovery call – Jigsaw Tree