AI won’t replace advisers but it will replace excuses

Gabriella Peters, ACA Partnerships & GTM, at Saturn explains:

Let’s talk about compliance not as a burden, but as the biggest missed opportunity in financial planning. Being a former Big Four auditor has its merits beyond just irritating management and finance teams. It’s taught me that compliance isn’t inherently hard, it’s just manual and repetitive, it comes from workflows built in a pre-digital world.

Fast forward a decade on from RDR, and now with Consumer Duty, for many firms, compliance feels like an unnecessary tick-box exercise or an admin hurdle to overcome. With AI much of that heavy lifting is no longer needed. Firms that choose not to leverage AI will soon find themselves falling behind.

So why does compliance go wrong? It’s rarely ever about bad advice; it tends to be about missing proof. No transcript? Then you’re relying on memory and scribbled notes for key suitability notes. No underlying audit trail? Then you’re vulnerable in the event of a complaint. Missing client phrasing and words in your notes? That’s a problem under Consumer Duty. And if your team is still drafting suitability letters from scratch or chasing data across siloed systems, you’re not just losing time, you’re taking on risk.

Right now, too many firms are still trying to do this manually, and it’s costing them. It slows down onboarding, overwhelms admin teams, and turns paraplanners into proofreaders. This risk then snowballs and when the FCA comes knocking they won’t care about how busy you were they care whether you can evidence the advice given.

None of these faults come from cutting corners or not caring; it’s just from the friction caused by pre-digital processes that plague this industry. AI for the most part solves this.

With the right tools (and the right AI partner) audit trails can form the under layer of advice workflows. This means that every client meeting can be clearly documented, Consumer Duty can be evidenced directly, and there is very little that falls through the cracks in terms of follow ups and action points. Suitability letters can even be generated using compliant templates tailored to your firm’s tone and advice style.

But it’s not just about protection, it’s more about building your team’s confidence to focus on the bits of the job that really matter. Firms that have already deployed AI are seeing these benefits, unlocking capacity, so advisers can spend more time with clients and teams can deliver better quality advice that’s compliant by design.

There is a final harder truth: those firms who don’t use AI to solve for compliance will become the ones spending time fixing mistakes, and whilst AI won’t replace you it will widen the gap between those firms that are great and those that are not.

For more information contact Saturn.