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Paraplanners should not worry about artificial intelligence (AI) replacing their jobs – but they must upskill to ensure they stay ahead of the game.
That was the verdict from two industry experts when speaking at the Empowering Advice Through Technology (EATT) conference in London today (30 January).
TFAS Wealth chief executive Jeff Lange and Chesterton House Financial Planning programme manager Sapna Shapero agreed AI had revolutionised the role of the paraplanner.
Lange referenced the CEO of NVIDIA Jensen Huang, saying that “AI is unlikely to replace your job, but somebody using AI is much more likely to”.
Therefore, he said he would urge paraplanners to embrace the technology and become experts in it.
“Paraplanners, historically, we think about them as a technical problem solvers,” he said.
“All those technical bits and pieces like trust planning and pension comparison, running SAP reports.
“I think for me the paraplanners of the future will be the ones that can most effectively utilise these emerging technology solutions.
“The ones that are really familiar with how those systems integrate and essentially become more and more efficient in the job.”
Shapero said: “I don’t think personally that in the short to mid-term the paraplanners or even administrators should be super worried about losing their jobs.
“We’re seeing change in what we might traditionally think of as paraplanner roles administrator roles, so for us that’s the administration function.”
During the panel discussion, both Lange and Shapero explained the ways their respective firms are utilising AI.
Lange said TFAS Wealth is using Microsoft Copilot to carry out tasks from drafting letters to summarising huge mass data to improve consumer outcomes.
He said: “AI really is more powerful than if you got the right back-office software in place.”
Lange said TFAS started by “looking at our inefficiencies, what solutions can be plugged into, and how we can make sense of what is a very complicated tech-stack world around us”.
“It’s about making sure the systems and controls are in place and governance, then ‘how do we continuously validate the data?’”
Shapero said she can “see that shift in those traditional roles being less and introducing more roles that align to the automation we’re looking to create.”
They also discussed how AI could be utilised to narrow the advice gap.
Shapero said Chesterton House is using AI tools to try and introduce a lower cost proposition.
This, she said, will help the firm provide a service to a wider market and enable it to “close the advice gap a much as we can”.
Lange said TFAS Wealth was taking a slightly different angle.
“I think rather than looking at a different lower-cost model, for us it’s about reducing our operational overheads and increasing the efficiencies so we can lower the asset levels that we could service effectively as an organisation.”