CPD: A practical system for building client confidence – Value of Advice (Part 1)

Financial security has overtaken retirement planning as the leading driver of advice, and competing financial goals are reshaping client conversations.

Introduction

As the advice profession continues to evolve, so too do client expectations and perceptions of the value of advice. Perhaps nothing sums up this shift as perfectly as this observation from an adviser interviewed for Russell Investments’ 2026 Value of an Adviser research:

“Clients aren’t asking about performance. They’re asking, ‘Are we going to be okay?’ It’s not about the numbers. It’s about being that life coach, that behavioural coach.”^[1]

Any adviser can show a client how their portfolio performed, what tax was saved and whether they remain on track for retirement, and it can be tempting to revert to these more ‘functional’ metrics when articulating the value advice is delivering in exchange for a $5,000+ advice fee.

What is harder to show is the value of the panic sale avoided, or the family relationships saved. Yet it is these less visible outcomes that increasingly represent what clients seek most from their adviser.

Russell’s Value of an Adviser (VoA) study quantified this trend some time ago, its proprietary formula allocating a greater annual value to behavioural coaching (2.8% p.a.) than to asset allocation (1.5% p.a.) and tax planning (1.2% p.a.). The 2026 edition of their study goes even deeper, finding that reassurance about financial security has overtaken retirement planning as the leading reason advised clients seek advice.

The importance of confidence as an advice outcome is also increasing, a trend reinforced by research from both Russell – who found that client confidence in achieving goals more than doubled after receiving advice (83% v 41%) – and Generation Life, for whom a CoreData study found that ‘confidence in navigating the complexities of financial planning’ was the leading reason HNW Australians used an adviser, nominated by 40 per cent^[2].

But as valuable – and valued – as the instilling of confidence may be, the challenge for advisers is to make clear everything they have done to create it. Because while confidence may be intangible, it is not an accidental outcome – it is built by design through clarity, informed choices, and the advice that helps clients remain calm and committed in the face of volatile markets, legislative uncertainty, and changing personal circumstances.

This article focuses on the systemisation of confidence building. Drawing on Russell’s 2026 VoA study and other industry and academic sources, it examines the role confidence plays in advice and sets out a practical framework for building it and making it more visible to clients.

From retirement planning to reassurance – the evolving drivers of advice demand

Retirement planning has traditionally been one of the strongest triggers for seeking advice, and one of the scenarios where the outcomes sought by the client, and the value added by the advice, were most obvious.

As recently as 2025, 90 per cent of advisers surveyed by Russell identified retirement planning as a primary driver of advice demand^[3], and it is easy to understand why. Australia’s retirement income system requires clients to navigate complex and changing investment, superannuation, tax, income and social security settings, and few retirees have the confidence and knowledge to attempt this journey without expert help.

But the nature of that demand is changing. In Russell’s 2026 research, reassurance about financial security overtook retirement planning as the leading reason advised clients sought advice, nominated by 43 per cent and 38 per cent respectively.

This shift is also evident in what advisers are experiencing.

While retirement planning remained a leading driver of advice, its prominence slipped, down from 90 to 73 per cent. Separately, the proportion of advisers identifying guidance around financial choices as a key demand driver rose from 28 per cent to 40 per cent, and one-third reported spending increasing amounts of time helping clients navigate complex decisions rather than optimising portfolios.

Part of that shift may reflect a change in who is walking through the door, not just what existing clients want. For younger clients – Millennials and Gen Z – retirement planning does not appear among the top three reasons to seek advice. Millennials are more likely to nominate navigating options and reassurance, while Gen Z clients are most likely to say they need help ‘simply knowing where to start’.

With younger, non-advised investors considerably more likely than Baby Boomers to say they are likely to consider using an adviser – 66 per cent of Gen Z and 59 per cent of Millennials, compared with 29 per cent of Baby Boomers – the profession’s client base may be changing both its expectations and, gradually, its composition. Both forces point in the same direction: fewer conversations built solely around a retirement destination, and more built around ongoing decisions.

Nor have conversations about investment performance ceased to matter. Clients expect advisers to provide sound investment and technical advice. What increasingly distinguishes a valued advice relationship, however, is the application of that expertise and guidance when clients face uncertainty and difficult decisions.

Reassurance in this context is not a promise that nothing will go wrong. It is confidence that the strategy has been carefully considered and is flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances.

Giving clients a framework for trade-offs

The growing demand for reassurance reflects the growing complexity of the environment in which financial decisions are being made.

The increasingly common blended family and the sandwich generation are two socio-demographic trends that are reshaping the demand for advice. Throw in the complexities of intergenerational transfer – which is seeing the concept of the early inheritance become more common – and it is clear that many seeking advice are facing competing demands on their time and capital. Indeed, Russell found that competing financial goals increased from 23 per cent to 31 per cent as a reason advised clients sought advice, the largest movement recorded in the 2026 research.

The financial pressures on clients can be substantial.

Australian Seniors’ 2025 research^[4] found that ‘sandwiched’ caregivers provided an average of almost $1,500 a month to parents or in-laws and almost $1,300 to younger dependants. And this has a knock-on effect. Seventy per cent had already adjusted their retirement plans or expected to do so because of their caregiving responsibilities.

For clients in these circumstances, a technically sound recommendation is only part of the answer. Another is giving clients a framework for decision making in the face of competing demands, helping them to identify each obligation and to understand the consequences of giving one obligation precedence over another.

Helping a child purchase a home, for example, may mean saving less or accepting a lower level of retirement income. Meeting a parent’s aged care costs could require changes to investments or estate plans. Each option may be financially possible, but the appropriate choice will depend on the client’s resources, responsibilities and personal priorities.

The adviser is not the one who can decide which family obligation should matter most. But they can deliver value by creating a disciplined process through which the client can make that decision themselves.

By turning several competing and emotionally charged concerns into a structured set of choices, advice can help clients achieve clarity. That clarity provides a stronger basis for informed decisions and, in turn, for confidence that the resulting strategy reflects what matters most to the client.

Confidence as an outcome of advice

One of the clearest findings in the 2026 VoA study is the difference between how clients rate their confidence before and after receiving advice. Before advice, 41 per cent strongly agreed they were confident of achieving their financial goals. After receiving advice, that figure more than doubled, to 83 per cent.

The result does not mean every advised client will achieve every goal, nor does it provide an objective measure of financial capability. It does, however, indicate that clients associate advice with a much stronger belief that their financial objectives are achievable.

The FAAA’s 2025 Value of Advice Consumer Research^[5] provides further evidence of this nexus between advice and increased financial confidence. Its Financial Confidence Index, which measures expectations of financial security, ability to achieve goals and capacity to manage personal risk, recorded a score of 74 among advised Australians, compared with only 57 among those who were unadvised. The same research found that 98 per cent of advised clients believed their adviser had supported them to make the best possible financial decisions.

In academic research^[6], this is sometimes described as financial self-efficacy: an individual’s self-perceived capacity to manage their finances, and their confidence in doing so.

Confidence matters because a financial strategy can only deliver its intended benefits if the client understands it and is prepared to act on it. As financial adviser Scott Hammond explained in the Russell report:

“[Working with an adviser] increases clarity, increases capability, and that leads to increased confidence.”^[7]

His observation captures an important sequence. Advice creates confidence by helping clients understand their position and make informed decisions. Confidence is not an incidental emotional benefit accruing after the technical work is complete. It is one of the outcomes that advice should be designed to produce.

It is worth flagging an important distinction between confidence and overconfidence.

While confidence should be cultivated, overconfidence is a behavioural bias that can lead to wealth-destroying decisions, and advisers need to be able to recognise and counter it. The truism ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ can certainly rear its head in advice scenarios, especially in the era of AI-powered search, which has made everyone an ‘expert’.

As Morningstar decision science expert Ryan Murphy observed^[8], investors can become overly optimistic about their knowledge or judgement. The objective of advice is therefore not to make clients feel certain regardless of the evidence. It is to build grounded confidence based on clear information, and a realistic understanding of the risks and consequences attached to different choices.

In this sense, informed consent, while fundamentally a compliance obligation, is also a foundation of confidence.

Making invisible value visible through confidence

An earlier article in this series examined how much of the value advisers create can remain unseen, and how transparency and communication can make that value easier for clients to recognise^[9]. Russell’s 2026 report brings this idea to the foreground, making “invisible value” its central theme and identifying greater visibility as a strategic priority for advice businesses.

This is not a response to widespread client dissatisfaction. 90 per cent of advised clients describe their adviser as providing good or excellent value, up from 84 per cent in 2025, despite average annual fees rising from $4,572 to $5,235^[10]. The issue is that clients do not always recognise which aspects of advice have produced that value.

The largest perception gaps concern advice tailored to the client’s needs and values, the affordability of fees, and guidance through choices and trade-offs. For example, tailored advice saw a 6-point gap between client need and adviser delivery, with 36 per cent of clients identifying it as important, while 30 per cent believed their adviser was delivering it. Similarly, guidance through choices and trade-offs recorded a 4-point gap between importance and perceived performance.

Behavioural coaching provides the starkest example of misalignment.

Seventy-eight per cent of advisers strongly agreed that helping clients avoid costly mistakes during volatility was a benefit of advice – and various studies have quantified just how significant^[11] this value is – yet only 27 per cent of clients agreed. Advisers ranked it first; clients ranked it last.

This does not necessarily mean the coaching has failed, or that advisers are on a different planet to their clients. Effective mentoring and coaching may leave no visible outcome because the knee-jerk sale in a falling market never happened, the losses were never crystallised, and the poorly thought through idea was quietly shelved. The client benefits – sometimes enormously – from the decisions they were prevented from making, but no matter how many times they have been ‘talked down from the ledge’, they often forget the adviser’s role by the time of their next review.

Confidence can be similarly difficult to attribute. Clients may feel calmer and better equipped to act without consciously connecting those changes to the processes and conversations that produced them.

Making this value visible requires advisers to show the connection between their work and the client’s experience, and again, the legal obligations around compliant advice perform a double duty as a way of baking increased visibility into the advice process. Instead of reporting only what was recommended, advisers should explain which alternatives were considered and what risks were avoided.

This is not simply a way to justify fees. It helps clients participate more meaningfully in decisions and recognise that confidence is supported by an advice process, rather than arising by chance.

Systemising confidence in your advice

If confidence is an outcome of advice, then every step of the advice process should work towards building it. Visibly. This includes everything from the client discovery process, through to the design and presentation of recommendations, ongoing client communication, and regular reviews.

We are not talking about adding another layer of red tape or psychometric assessment. Rather, advisers should be more overtly uncovering what is creating uncertainty and barriers to confidence and then demonstrating the advice response.

Below is a rudimentary framework for systemising the building of confidence, so the process becomes repeatable and visible. These are largely steps advisers already follow every day. The challenge is to make them more visible to the client.

• Establish a confidence baseline
  Ask clients to rate their confidence in achieving a goal, then ask: “What would make you feel more confident?” The question often surfaces worries that a standard fact-find misses. This is simply a conversation prompt, not a formal measure.
• Identify the source of uncertainty
  Uncertainty can stem from different sources: naming those source(s) can clarify the nature of the response required.
• Show the decision pathway
  A compliant advice process involves explaining the alternatives considered and why the recommendation best fits the client’s goals and circumstances. This makes the options considered and rejected just as important. Taking clients through the judgement, not just the outcome, can make visible a lot of hard work that may otherwise be relegated in prominence.
• Stress-test the strategy visibly
  Modelling a market fall, legislative change or unexpected expense shows how the plan is built to respond. The goal is not to predict every event, but to show that responses are ready if conditions change.
• Keep a record of decisions and avoided risks
  A brief decision record, covering what was considered, what was advised and why, preserves value that might otherwise be forgotten by the next review. This could even include modelling the consequences of the panic sale, and the late re-entry into a recovering market.
• Agree on communication triggers
  The elevated market turbulence during 2026 has seen communication frequency increase. Russell’s study shows 67 per cent of clients now speaking with their adviser three or more times a year, up from 60 per cent in 2025¹². The FAAA also found that clients particularly value proactive contact during volatile markets¹³. More contact is not automatically valuable, so make sure contact is timely and purposeful. Advisers should also agree with clients which events warrant contact, and which channels they prefer.
• Revisit confidence at each review
  Return to the client’s earlier concerns: what has become clearer, what remains unresolved and whether new decisions have emerged. This connects any change in confidence to the advice delivered.

These practices make confidence more observable without reducing it to a single score. They also help clients see how advice has strengthened their ability to make informed choices and remain committed to an appropriate strategy.

Conclusion: confidence made visible

When clients ask, “Are we going to be okay?”, they are not necessarily asking their adviser to predict the future or guarantee an outcome. They want to know that their options have been properly considered and there is a plan for responding when circumstances change.

The answer advisers provide is not certainty, but preparedness. Investment performance and progress towards financial goals remain fundamental, but Russell’s findings suggest clients increasingly value the reassurance that allows them to make difficult decisions and remain committed to them.

Treating confidence as a deliberate advice outcome gives advisers a way to demonstrate this less visible contribution. The result is not a client who believes nothing can go wrong, but one who understands why a particular course has been chosen and feels equipped to respond when circumstances inevitably change.

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References:
[1] https://russellinvestments.com/content/ri/au/en-gb/financial-professional/tools-and-education/business-solutions/value-of-adviser.html
[2] https://generationlife-endpoint.azureedge.net/live/attachments/cmmsvqf0h0qzn0qmowczkh0cu-gl-navigatinguncertaintyreportadviser-final.pdf
[3] https://russellinvestments.com/content/ri/au/en-gb/financial-professional/tools-and-education/business-solutions/value-of-adviser.html
[4] https://www.seniors.com.au/documents/whitepaper-sandwich-generation-report-2025.pdf
[5] https://faaa.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Value-of-Advice-2025.pdf
[6] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ952966.pdf
[7] https://russellinvestments.com/content/ri/au/en-gb/financial-professional/tools-and-education/business-solutions/value-of-adviser.html
[8] https://rpc.cfainstitute.org/research/multimedia/2020/overconfidence-in-human-decision-making
[9] https://www.adviservoice.com.au/2025/12/cpd-transparency-and-communication-making-the-value-of-advice-visible/
[10]https://russellinvestments.com/content/ri/au/en-gb/financial-professional/tools-and-education/business-solutions/value-of-adviser.html
[11]https://spotlight.morningstarhub.com.au/coaching-risk-averse-investors-in-times-of-market-volatility/
[12] https://russellinvestments.com/content/ri/au/en-gb/financial-professional/tools-and-education/business-solutions/value-of-adviser.html
[13] https://faaa.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Value-of-Advice-2025.pdf