How Aon Helped M&G Wealth Develop New Advisor Skills

Aon partnered with UK financial advice firm M&G Wealth to help the firm better understand the make-up of a highly successful advisor of the future, including the skills needed given shifts in societal needs, technology and regulation.

Key Takeaways

Talent assessments, workforce skills management and human capital analytics help employers determine where they have skills gaps and make better hiring and performance management decisions.
M&G Wealth and Aon partnered to assess the make-up of a successful financial advisor of the future.
As people’s financial needs, priorities and retirement plans evolve, financial firms are focusing on reskilling and upskilling their workforce.

Everywhere across the financial services landscape, the outlook is changing — and quickly. People’s needs and priorities are more diverse than they’ve ever been. This is why it’s crucial that professionals consider their business through the lens of how sustainable, representative and accommodating it is, both now and in the future.

UK financial advice firm M&G Wealth reached out to Aon’s Talent Solutions team with an objective to engage more people to seek advice and help them achieve long-term financial wellbeing. The client wanted to better understand the make-up of a highly successful advisor of the future, including the skills needed to achieve great client outcomes in a world where societal needs, technology and regulation are rapidly evolving.

“For M&G Wealth Advice, our focus is around how we help bring personalized financial advice to more people. We’ve made a commitment to grow our business and make advice more accessible. This includes bringing more people with more diverse backgrounds and skill sets through our Academy,” remarked Ross Liston, CEO of M&G Wealth Advice.

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Aon’s talent team partnered with M&G to help them better understand how to:

Engage people from all walks of life with diverse skill sets and life experiences to broaden the current pool of advice expertise
Champion advice partners and equip them with the skills they need to build relationships, enhance client outcomes and make their business future-fit

The project began by exploring how the advisor role has evolved in recent years in order to identify which behaviors and skills are key to success. The team at Aon worked to:

Identify key skills
Interview current advisors to determine where the gaps existed
Convene focus groups to help identify some of the challenges

Aon Talent Solutions Partner Charlotte Schaller explained: “Together we explored how the expectations of advisors have evolved, as have the skills that are key to their success. We also pinpointed key attributes and techniques that were even more critical to help existing advisors flourish in their current role, and identify future advisors needed to open up advice to more people.”

That process helped M&G evolve its relationship with advisors to help with succession planning, upskilling, and hiring and developing plans designed to reflect evolving societal need.

“The work we did to prepare our current workforce and recruit a new generation of advisors was all about making connections, building trust and maintaining long-lasting relationships with our clients,” Liston said. “As a sector, we must continue to evolve to be more relatable, more relevant and to reflect the society that we serve in all our decisions.”

Schaller added: "Advisors are constantly evolving to meet new customer demands and they need strategies to help them adapt.”

Talent assessment tools, workforce skills management and human capital analytics can provide data, analytics and frameworks to hire the right candidates and assess the current skills of your workforce to determine where there are gaps. Through Aon’s engagement, M&G was better equipped to take on the challenges of the future and turn them into potential opportunities for both clients and advisors alike — getting them even closer to their goal of offering advice to all.

Aon’s Thought Leader