In conversation with Johan Minnie, CEO, Consult

The advice profession is entering a defining chapter, not because the fundamentals of financial planning have changed, but because the client has.

Looking back on 2025, Johan Minnie believes the most important shift was not market-related, nor purely regulatory. It was behavioural. Clients arrived at advice conversations better informed, more questioning, and more demanding of relevance. Not in an adversarial way, but in a way that signals a deeper truth: advice is becoming increasingly client controlled.

“Clients are becoming a lot more client-centric,” he says. “They are more informed, and in many cases, they come into the meeting with a flying start.”

The reason is obvious: AI. In seconds, a client can generate a decent financial plan outline by asking a large language model. It costs nothing. It’s instant. And it creates the perception that “the answer” is readily available.

For advisors, this is both a disruption and an invitation. Because while technology can generate a plan, it cannot take responsibility for outcomes. It cannot interpret a client’s life context with empathy. It cannot manage the emotional reality of risk, loss, uncertainty, and expectation. And it cannot be accountable.

That is where leadership in advice now matters most.

A margin squeeze and a moment of truth - Johan is frank about what this new client environment means for the economics of advice: pressure on margins is increasing. Distribution is expensive. Compliance is heavy. And the cost of being competent across multiple providers, products, and solutions is rising.

Agency models are feeling that pressure, he notes, and independence has its own realities: earnings are constrained, regulation is tightening, and the complexity of “being on top of your game” is no longer optional.

A financial plan is one thing. Delivering the right solution, consistently, for the right client, at the right time, that is the real work. And it comes with both cost and risk.

Overlay this with the long-anticipated arrival of COFI, and 2025 starts to look like a year of preparation: businesses assessing readiness, advisors confronting operational gaps, and the industry watching for signs of who will adapt, and who will struggle.

Moving from disclosure to control - Rather than reading regulation as a checklist, Johan prefers to interpret the “spirit of the law”. At its heart, he believes, COFI is designed to place the client in control. Not necessarily at the moment of sale, but over the life of the relationship. It pushes the industry beyond compliance theatre, beyond forms, projections, and disclaimers, toward something more demanding: meeting client expectations in a measurable way.

“We’ve all said for years we put the client first,” Johan notes. “Now it’s going to be tested. Have we really been meeting expectations, or have we been filling out paperwork?”

That distinction is critical. The traditional rhythm of advice often looks like this: introduction, data gathering, proposal, quote, projection, explanation, disclaimer. The client signs, and the file is compliant.

But the future, Johan argues, requires a different framing: the client has goals. The client has dreams, needs, aspirations and above all, expectations. And the advisor’s job is to help the client articulate these, visualise the end result and walk a path, with accountability, toward those expectations, even as circumstances change.

He points to the idea of “advice that meets your context” as a powerful lens. Because advice cannot be vanilla. It must be contextual, and context is dynamic.

Markets shift. Inflation changes. Returns surprise to the upside or disappoint. Life happens: marriage, children, divorce, retrenchment, new businesses, illness, relocation. These events are not “side notes” to the plan. They reshape the vision and hence the plan.

And in this environment, the quality of advice will increasingly be judged not by how well documents were explained, but by how well expectations were managed, and outcomes navigated, through changing contexts.

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