The latest episode of the NewIn Podcast brings together two guests whose journeys into financial services couldn't have been more different from the traditional route, yet both tell a story that's quietly reshaping an industry long overdue for fresh blood.
Scott's story starts where many do - with a plan that didn't quite survive contact with reality. He studied criminology with dreams of joining the police, only for the 2008 financial crisis to slam a recruitment ban on public services. What followed was 14 years managing a supermarket, steadily climbing the ladder while that nagging feeling of "there's more to life than this", grew louder in the background.
By his mid-thirties, with a young son, a mortgage, and another child on the way, Scott found himself scrolling Indeed and stumbling across an advert for the Verve Foundation, a programme designed to bring new talent into financial services. It wasn't a lightning bolt moment. It was something more deliberate than that.
What followed was two years of grinding - sitting exams after 11-hour shifts, getting up at 5am on days off to study, and quietly restructuring his family's finances so they could absorb the income drop he knew was coming. When he finally passed his sixth and final exam, he handed in his notice the very next day. Not because anything had gone wrong, but because everything was fine, and he still felt unfulfilled. That was the tipping point.
"Nothing's happened and I still feel like this. So I know there's something not right."
There's something quietly powerful about that. Most people wait for a crisis to justify a change. Scott made his move from a place of stability, armed with a plan.
He's now an associate financial adviser in Newcastle, just four to six weeks into the role - and already reflecting on how his background in leading teams of 400–500 people brings a perspective that purely finance-trained colleagues simply don't have.
Holly's route was different again. A history graduate with no particular plan, she spotted a tweet from Newcastle University advertising a paraplanner role at what was then Para-Sols (now Verve). She applied on a whim, got through the assessment day, and hasn't looked back.
Seven years later, after working her way through admin and paraplanning, she's now an associate financial planner - though she's quick to laugh that her mum still introduces her as an accountant.
Holly's story is one of gradual confidence rather than a dramatic leap. She's candid about the fact that in her twenties she simply didn't feel old enough or experienced enough to sit in front of clients and tell them what to do with their money. It wasn't until she'd spent years immersed in the technical side - building cashflow models, writing suitability reports, understanding the compliance framework from the inside - that she felt ready to step forward.
What's striking is her advocacy for the paraplanning pathway. She's unequivocal: everyone who wants to advise should be a paraplanner first. The clients notice the difference. The compliance team notices the difference. And crucially, when you're in a meeting and a client asks something unexpected, the technical grounding is what keeps you steady.
Both stories share a telling detail: neither Scott nor Holly would have ended up in financial services if not for a single piece of accidental content - a job advert on Indeed, a tweet from a university account. That's a fragile pipeline for an industry facing a very real talent problem.
The episode doesn't shy away from this. Cathi raises the FCA's own data showing adviser numbers have stayed flat, and while the average age has nudged down to the late forties, the profession is still largely invisible to young people from working-class backgrounds who've never met a financial adviser, never had parents who used one, and have no reason to think the job exists let alone that it might be for them.
Scott puts it plainly: growing up in Sunderland, nobody talked about financial advisers. It simply wasn't part of the cultural fabric. Holly echoes this almost word for word about her own upbringing.
The industry talks about diversity of talent, but still largely relies on chance discovery to bring in people who don't fit the traditional mould. Graduate scheme intakes are down 39% in the last year. The pipeline has never felt more fragile.
And yet. There are reasons for optimism. Our programmes exist specifically to address this gap. New talent alliances and dedicated career pathways are beginning to emerge. Companies are reopening graduate schemes even amid economic uncertainty. The conversations are shifting, slowly, from identifying the problem to actually doing something about it.
One of the most interesting threads running through the episode is a quiet reframing of what financial advice is actually for. Both Scott and Holly push back, gently but clearly, against the perception that it's a service for the wealthy full of investment portfolios and inheritance tax planning.
The planning itself, Scott argues, is often more valuable than any specific product recommendation. When can you stop working? What do you actually need to live the life you want? How much do you need to save, and from when? These are questions that benefit everyone - perhaps especially people who've never had anyone help them think about money strategically before.
Holly makes a similar point from a different angle. She talks about clients going through divorce, about the emotional weight of those conversations, about the moment you can tell someone they can retire five years earlier than they thought. That's not maths. That's not sales. That's something much closer to what she describes as changing someone's life.
It's a vision of financial advice that's harder to slot into a meme about Wolf of Wall Street, and maybe that's exactly why it struggles to reach the people who'd benefit from it most.
If there's a single thread connecting Scott's story and Holly's, it's this: the financial planning profession has an enormous amount to gain from people who come to it later, from unexpected directions, with different life experiences and different ways of seeing problems. And it has an enormous amount to lose if it keeps relying on happy accidents to find them.
At the Verve Foundation, we're trying to make those accidents a little less accidental. One tweet, one advert, one episode at a time.
Interested in starting a career in financial services? Visit Careers in Finance to browse roles and create a free profile. If you're interested in our New Talent programme, just click here to find out more.
