I’ve had a few wake up calls recently that have reminded me that I am now officially too old to die young. 

The first was showing someone how to find their NI record to ensure they get their full State Pension.

When I did this I thought I would check my own record to find that, as of the beginning of April, I have 50 years of NI contributions - half a century.

The other wake up call was an initial chat with a potential client who was born in 1982, coincidentally the year I started in financial services.

So with the Financial Planning Today Editor's kind indulgence, I thought I would reflect on where we have come from, look at where we are now and share my thoughts on what we are doing so much better, what we are not doing as well as we would like and things that need improving.

Let’s start with the context of those ‘Old Days’. You will note the lack of the word ‘Good’ in that sentence.

My personal experience – at least initially - was of commission-only direct sales. Little training, poor management, sell or you don’t feed your family. No wonder consumers – and companies – experienced less than good outcomes. It’s great that almost nobody reading this will know what 'tombstoning' and 'windowing' were.

High staff turnover, often high charging products, high lapse rates. The clients lived by ‘caveat emptor’, with little, if any, real protection. I wonder that anyone of us emerged from that model. I have been told I was just too stubborn to fail.

And the banks and ‘upmarket’ salesforces were not much better. Systemic, quota-driven mis selling and the ‘creative’ actuarial delights of Equitable Life, hidden behind upmarket branding.

Along came the Financial Services Act in April 1988, closely followed by the introduction of Buyers' Guides and minimum qualifications – albeit FP1 only at first.

But, despite that bleak picture, some real, good things did happen. Families were insured. My first firm specialised in working with the Armed forces, and I remember seeing cheques – remember those? – being delivered through our branch to the families of some of those that had died in the Falklands.

Our other role was building wealth – or at least building some assets. So regular, almost painless, increases in savings that I know helped a lot of people out. Savings they would never have had if they had not been ‘sold’ a plan.

And if I fast forward to today, and of the things we really do not do very well, that is one at the top of the list. We don’t protect families as much as we should. We don’t help people build wealth and financial resilience very well. We call it the ‘Advice Gap’, but it’s often treated as a ‘Distribution Gap’.

It’s sad, but very few firms are willing to work with people who are high value clients of the future but have no real money now.

I would also say that those of us who survived the old model were taught real skills, especially in terms of actually listening to clients, of understanding what they were worried about and why. Call it sales skills, or call it ‘soft skills’, it’s a set of skills that went out of fashion for a very long time.

And it shows up in firms where a certain generation are brilliant technically, totally ethical, but not always great at attracting and working with new clients, especially at points of stress in clients lives. But I do think the pendulum is swinging back…perhaps?

As a profession – and I’m looking at the platforms in all of this – we are also really poor at dealing with families when someone dies. Much has been written – and will be written – on this subject. But too often the platforms' first action on the death of a client is to shut the adviser out of the loop, just when we are often needed the most. We need to get better at this – and fast.

So, a mixed bag. We came from a tough times, and most things today are so much better. But not everything…

In future columns, I will look at what we do much, much better than we did, and some things we were promised that really have not come off.

Phil Billingham FPFS CFP Chartered Financial Planner, Chartered Fellow (Financial Planning) is a Financial Planner and a director of Perceptive Planning, a Chartered Financial Planning firm based in London and Essex. https://www.perceptiveplanning.co.uk/

Biography: Phil joined the profession in 1982 and is a past director of the Institute of Financial Planning (IFP) which merged with the CISI in 2015. He is a past member of the Financial Planning Standards Board (FPSB) Regulatory Advisory Panel. He is a specialist in helping advisers cope with regulatory change and has worked with advisers, planners and regulators in the UK, Europe, USA, Canada, South Africa and Australia. He writes this column most months for Financial Planning Today.