Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher are back around the SoapBox, and this week they are joined by Michelle Hoskin, founder and CEO of Standards International and co-founder of The Business and Operations Management Network. What follows is a no-holds-barred debate about who survives the next few years in financial planning and who gets picked off. It is also, for the record, one of the funniest episodes we have recorded.
Adviser 3.0 is funding five tickets to the Empowering Excellence Conference & Awards 2026 in London. Enter before entries close.
The AI You Can't Opt Out Of
The episode opens on news of an AI model breaking out of its own test sandbox, and the cyber risk that rides along with it. Abraham's argument is uncomfortable but hard to dodge: the vulnerabilities in your technology stack are there whether or not you use AI, and an attacker does not need your permission to go looking for them.
"The attacker doesn't need your permission. Opting out is not an option."
For advisers who assume they are safe because they keep AI at arm's length, the message is blunt. Your clients are already using these tools, quite openly, and standing still is a risk of its own.
SJP's Crumbling Moat
Some of St. James's Place's biggest practices have started breaking away, picked off by the likes of Söderberg and True Potential. Abraham traces it to the quiet erosion of the two defences that kept advisers locked in: the exit charges clients faced when an adviser left, and the loan-funded valuations that let books of business change hands at generous prices.
"It's almost like they're trauma bonded to big."
The uncomfortable question the panel sits with is whether the advisers who stay are staying for good reasons, or simply because leaving feels unthinkable after two decades inside the machine.
£1bn Platform Tech Losses
With one of the sector's biggest platform-technology players posting losses of around a billion pounds, the panel asks what the future holds for tired legacy tech. Abraham's take is measured: the backers are there and the restructuring will happen, so advisers should be asking whether their platform can keep pace, not whether it is about to vanish.
"The clunky, the slow, the rigid, we're no longer putting up with it."
Michelle frames it as a sign of the times, the same shift that finished off Woolworths and Kodak, and the reason a maddening booking experience once sent her from BA to a pricier Virgin flight without a second thought.
Who Really Runs Your Firm
The episode ends on Michelle's mission. Firms will happily sell out conference tickets for advisers and planners, she argues, yet will not train, pay properly or release the operations people who keep the lights on. Slot ops in under compliance, treat anyone who is not an adviser as an afterthought, and you miss where the whole profession is heading.
"The CEOs of the future won't be planners. They'll be operations people."
It is also the moment Abraham offers to fund five tickets to Michelle's conference for the operations and admin people in planning firms, which is exactly the giveaway above.
