Adviser 3.0: The Podcast

The FCA has asked the world's biggest AI companies to behave themselves. Politely. Rebecca Aldridge, Managing Director and founder of Balance: Wealth Planning, joins Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher on the SoapBox, and the debate gets lively. A major provider wants to hand advisers slick, white label advice tech for their smaller clients. Brilliant innovation, or a way for advisers to eat the...

Who Pays? Part 2 of 2 Britain’s billionaires are packing their bags. Should we feel sorry for them? In the second half of this bumper SoapBox, Matt Pitcher and Abraham Okusanya are back with Clémence Chatelin, Chartered Financial Planner at Ovation Finance, and the gloves come off. First up is the London Stock Exchange. Companies are being bought up and taken private, almost nobody is listing, and...

Who Pays? Part 1 of 2 What if the worst-case scenario in your cash flow model isn’t bad enough anymore? In the first half of a bumper SoapBox, Matt Pitcher and Abraham Okusanya are joined by Clémence Chatelin, Chartered Financial Planner at Ovation Finance, and the sparks fly early. Clem asks how you plan a retirement in a world of floods, wildfires and homes that can no longer be insured. Abraham...

“My business is my pension.” Reme Holland hears it all the time from business owners, and he always gives the same answer: it really isn’t. Reme runs financial planning inside Albert Goodman, one of the South West’s biggest accountancy firms. That gives him a front-row seat to what happens when planners and accountants share a building, and a client. He tells Abraham Okusanya how he went from knoc...

Philippa Hann spent the best part of 20 years as a litigator in financial services, working on the scandals that kept on coming. Underneath every one sat the same question: why do good people do bad things? Her new book, The Fault Lines of Finance, co-written with neuropsychologist Dr Moira Somers, is her answer, and she joins Abraham Okusanya to unpack it. Philippa's argument is that miscondu...

Lisa Conway-Hughes never expected to end up in financial advice. She always felt it wasn't an industry for people like her, so when she founded LCH Wealth she set out to build the firm she would actually have wanted as a client. In this episode, host Kate Phillips traces Lisa's route from a commission-only role cold-booking appointments, with no safety net to fall back on, to becoming a di...

SoapBox is the undiluted edition of Adviser 3.0, where Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher give their unfiltered take on the news moving UK financial advice. This week they're joined by Emma Bird, Financial Planning Director at Hansford Bell, for a wide-ranging and often provocative conversation. They open on the news that a long-trusted technical and tax resource is being pulled in-house, what...

A portfolio built from the biggest, best companies in the world, held right through one of the great bull markets, and it still lost to inflation. How does that happen, and who is it happening to? That is where this episode of SoapBox begins. Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher are joined by Julian Gilbert, Founder and Director of Wealth Matters, for a blunt hour on where financial advice earns its...

Ask a room full of advisers whether they have clients affected by special needs or disability, and most will say it is not really their world! Ali Fanshawe, Co-Founder of SENDA, is on the show to explain why that answer is almost always wrong, and why the families sitting quietly in every client bank are among the most exposed to getting the planning wrong. Abraham and Matt both admit, on air, how...

A bonus episode, and a look back at the standout conversations from across Adviser 3.0 and its sister show, SoapBox. Six moments worth a second listen. Nick Hutchings of Rockwealth on care fees, the annuities that pay for them, and why a fixed fee changes the whole conversation. Caroline Hawkesley of Craven Street Wealth on the cash sitting on platforms, and whether clients are getting their fair...

What does it take to walk away from a secure, senior role at one of the world's biggest asset managers and start again with nothing? Matt Abouzeid (Co-Founder and Managing Director) and Mohneet Dhir (Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer) came from Vanguard, where they helped shape how the UK invests. Matt spent fifteen years there, building the largest book of business in Vanguard's Eur...

Women run some of the best businesses in financial services. So why do men still run the biggest ones, and why does around eighty percent of private equity investment still flow to all-male boards? That is where this episode of SoapBox begins. Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher are joined by Victoria Hicks, CEO of Melo, and Gaynor Rigby, COO of Melo, for three of the most divisive questions in the...

When SpaceX entered the US total market index, some of the coverage asked whether index providers were reshaping the market rather than simply reflecting it. Rob Edwards, Global Head of Product and Research at Morningstar Indexes, has a blunter view of the job: accurately reflect the passive composition of the market, and let the market do the rest. In this episode, Abraham Okusanya and Timeline&#...

🏆 GIVEAWAY 🏆 We're funding five free tickets to the Empowering Excellence Conference and Awards 2026 in London. Enter now at https://adviser3point0.co/giveaway In this special episode of SoapBox, Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher are joined by Michelle Hoskin, founder of Standards International and co-founder of The Business and Operations Management Network, for a no-holds-barred look at a prof...

Victoria Hicks knows what a bad exit feels like! She sold her chartered financial planning firm in 2018, watched the culture collapse within weeks of completion, and spent the years that followed working out why so many sales go wrong. Today, as Founder and CEO of Melo, she's done over 100 transactions and helps firms grow, sell, and build with the end in mind. In this episode, Abraham sits do...

Matt Pitcher and Abraham Okusanya are back on the SoapBox, joined this time by Caroline Hawkesley, Managing Director of Craven Street Wealth. They open on the tax question no adviser can escape. With a new government expected under Andy Burnham and a £4.7bn hole in the defence budget, the speculation cycle is already grinding client decisions to a halt. Abraham makes the case that wealth taxes are...

Nick Hutchings is a Chartered Financial Planner, Accredited SOLLA adviser, and Founder of Rockwealth Reading. He accidentally niched into retirement planning, runs his own podcast The Retirement Lounge, and recently appeared on the Martin Lewis show. In this conversation with Abraham Okusanya, Nick is refreshingly honest about the fixed fees model, what it really takes to go solo, and why the care...

Recorded live at Adviser 3.0 2026, this is the fourth and final Sunset Studio Session. Nicki Hinton-Jones, CIO at Timeline, sits down with Gary Paulin, Chief Investment Strategist, International at Northern Trust Asset Management, for a conversation that starts with a warning: every major move of Gary's career has landed on a market top, from the Russian debt crisis to 9/11 to the GFC. But the...

Some conversations on SoapBox are uncomfortable. This is one of them. Abraham Okusanya and Matt Pitcher are joined by Lauren Turner, Head of Financial Planning and Chartered Financial Planner at TFP Financial Planning, to work through three topics that every adviser should be thinking about right now. First: has the SpaceX IPO broken indexing? The media says yes. The data says otherwise. Abraham m...

For years, financial advisers have been told that empathy is their ultimate competitive advantage, the moat that no algorithm can cross. But what if that assumption is the most dangerous bet in the profession? Recorded live at the Adviser 3.0 2026 conference, this special live edition of SoapBox takes Dan Haylett's viral LinkedIn article, The Empathy Delusion, as its starting point and tears i...

What does it actually take to build a financial planning firm that lasts, not just one that sells? Keith Butten, CFP Certified Financial Planner and co-founder of boosst, has spent four decades finding out. In this episode, Abraham sits down with Keith to explore the philosophy behind one of the UK's most distinctive lifestyle financial planning businesses, from scrapping self-employed advisers an...

What does it mean to protect your clients' wealth in a world where governments are spending without restraint? This session from the Adviser 3.0 2026 conference puts two of the most compelling voices in alternative assets on stage together -- and lets them argue it out. Dan Parkinson, the Bitcoin IFA, traces his conviction to Lebanon, where he watched a currency lose 99.9% of its purchasing po...

Olivia Maynard is Managing Director at TFP Financial Planning in Essex. In this episode, she shares how she went from school leaver to MD without ever planning it that way, why she stepped away from financial planning into operations, and how she has built a culture where no one is confined to a job box. Olivia talks about the "breath moment" - that exhale when a client finally lets go o...

Three CEOs. One stage. The biggest questions facing adviser businesses right now. Recorded live at Adviser 3.0 2026, this is the first of our Sunset Studio Sessions — a series of four panel conversations captured on stage at our flagship annual conference. The Sunset Studio stage is sponsored by Northern Trust Asset Management. Philippa Mather of Paradigm Norton, Jo French of Attivo, and Alan Smit...

A career built without a degree, a partnership earned without shortcuts, and a profession that risks losing its soul to consolidation. In this episode of Adviser 3.0, Kate Phillips is joined by Tara Maynard, Partner and Chartered Financial Adviser at PM+M, for an honest conversation about doing it your way in financial planning. Tara shares how financial circumstances steered her away from univers...