This Week in Brief

This has been a week where the abstract talk about AI in financial advice gave way to some very concrete numbers and names. The FCA has confirmed the eight firms taking part in its second AI Live Testing cohort and outlined when its findings will be published. EY released the most detailed consumer survey to date on how the public is actually using AI to manage money — and what UK savers think of it. And four separate adviser-facing AI launches landed in the trade press in the space of a few days. Taken together, the picture for IFAs is the same one we have been describing for months, only sharper: clients are using AI before they reach you, the regulator is moving from observation to evidence-gathering, and the tools available to advice firms now do real work rather than just demos.

Key Developments

Update: FCA Names the Eight Firms in Its Second AI Live Testing Cohort

Building on last week’s story that the second cohort would begin in late April, the FCA confirmed at the Innovate Finance Global Summit on 22 April who is taking part. The eight firms are Barclays, Experian, Lloyds Banking Group, UBS, Aereve, Coadjute, GoCardless and Palindrome. Their use cases span targeted investment support, credit scoring, anti-money laundering and “agentic” payments — meaning AI systems that take actions on a customer’s behalf rather than just offer suggestions. Testing runs until the end of 2026 and an evaluation report is due in the first quarter of 2027. The FCA also said it will publish a separate “good and poor practice” report on AI in financial services later this year, and the next intake of its Supercharged Sandbox — where firms test AI ideas using high-quality synthetic data — opens on 5 May. For advice firms, the practical takeaway is that the regulator is now actively gathering the evidence base it will use to set future expectations on Consumer Duty, accountability and AI governance. Anything that comes out of these programmes is likely to shape what good practice looks like in the years ahead.

EY: Half the World Now Uses AI for Financial Decisions — UK Lags but Catching Up

EY published a global consumer survey on 24 April covering 18,000 people across 23 countries, and the headline number is one IFAs should sit with for a moment: 49% said they had used AI in the past six months to help with savings or investment decisions. Among Gen Z it was 68% and among millennials 65%. The UK figures were lower than the global average — 35% had used AI for savings and investment, 14% for protecting their personal data, and 49% thought AI would be useful for spotting fraud — but they are still much higher than they were even a year ago. More than a third of respondents globally said they would find personalised AI-driven financial guidance “very or extremely helpful”. The implication for IFAs is straightforward. A meaningful share of your existing and prospective clients is already turning to ChatGPT or similar tools before they speak to you. They will arrive with views, comparisons and sometimes recommendations that did not come from a regulated source. Knowing how to gracefully meet that and add the value only a human adviser can is becoming a core part of the role.

Four New AI Tools Land in Adviser Trade Press in One Week

This week brought an unusually busy run of product news from the adviser-tech corner of the market.

AdvisoryAI announced that it generated more than 110,000 reports for UK financial advisers in the first quarter of 2026, alongside a brand refresh and a confirmed launch of a conversational interface later this month. The conversational tool is designed to pull together fragmented data from back-office systems and CRMs so an adviser can ask plain-English questions and get answers grounded in the firm’s own data.

Flagstone, the savings platform, announced a partnership with compliance fintech Adclear that has cut its marketing approval cycle from two days to eight hours by using AI to do a first-pass compliance review. The story matters less for Flagstone specifically and more as a real-world data point on what AI compliance review can do to turnaround times.

Jigsaw Tree and Virtual Operations launched “Eddie”, an AI-driven income reconciliation service. The firms estimate that advice businesses processing £2m to £5m of commission annually currently spend up to £35,000 a year on the manual side of this work. Eddie automates around 75% of the workflow, including bank statement collection and exception handling.

And Ani Tech launched a free AI-powered cashflow modelling app aimed at advisers, where you can build and compare scenarios using natural language and have an AI agent track client outcomes in the background.

None of these tools will, on their own, transform a practice. But the breadth of what is now available — meeting notes, suitability reports, marketing compliance, income reconciliation, cashflow planning — means that any firm that has not yet sat down to map which AI tools could help with which jobs is now meaningfully behind the curve.

Could AI Hollow Out the Junior Adviser Role?

A thoughtful piece by Roger Morris in FT Adviser this week asked an uncomfortable question. As AI takes over more of the admin burden — meeting notes, suitability letters, fact-find updates, reconciliation — what happens to the entry-level roles that those tasks have traditionally provided? Morris’s point is not that AI is replacing advisers; it is that the apprenticeship pathway into the profession has historically been built on doing precisely the work that AI is now doing best. Firms that automate aggressively without thinking about how the next generation of advisers will gain their experience may find themselves with a hiring problem in five years’ time. For practices, this is a planning question worth raising now: what will the junior role look like once the obvious admin is done by software?

Clients Are Using AI to Find Their Adviser — Not Just Their Investments

Professional Adviser ran a piece this week looking at how prospective clients now use AI to choose between advisers. The article identifies three patterns: clients who use AI to research a firm they have already been recommended; clients who use AI to compare and contrast a shortlist; and — increasingly — clients who simply describe their situation to ChatGPT and ask it to suggest who they should speak to. The important nuance for advisers is that AI tools do not rank firms by quality of advice. They rank them by digital footprint — what is written about you online, what reviews say, what content you publish, and how clearly your website explains what you do. The marketing implication is that the work needed to be visible to a human searcher and the work needed to be visible to an AI assistant are now substantially the same — and both are increasingly important.

From the Trade Press

  • “FCA’s AI testing needs ‘clear oversight’ to ensure it enhances advice” — Coverage of the second AI Live Testing cohort, with industry voices arguing that the programme will be valuable only if its findings translate into clear and proportionate expectations for firms. FT Adviser, 23 April 2026

  • “AdvisoryAI unveils brand refresh after record first quarter” — AdvisoryAI confirms 110,000 AI reports generated for UK advisers in Q1 2026, a brand refresh and an imminent conversational interface launch. A useful marker of how quickly adoption is moving in the adviser-tech space. FT Adviser, 21 April 2026

  • “Flagstone launches AI compliance partnership with Adclear” — Flagstone reports cutting its marketing compliance review cycle from two days to eight hours by introducing AI into the first-pass review. A concrete data point on the time savings AI compliance tools are now delivering. FT Adviser, 22 April 2026

  • “AI taking over admin could replace junior advice roles” — Roger Morris argues that the automation of admin tasks may close off the traditional pathway into advice and that firms need to plan now for how juniors will gain experience. FT Adviser, 23 April 2026

  • “‘AI wants the full picture’ — how clients use AI to find advisers” — A look at the three patterns by which prospective clients now use AI tools to research, compare and select advisers, and what that means for how firms should think about their digital presence. Professional Adviser, April 2026

What to Watch

The FCA’s “good and poor practice” report on AI, due later in 2026, is likely to be the single most useful regulator-published document of the year for advice firms — it will be the closest thing to a worked answer on what acceptable AI use in financial services looks like. In the meantime, keep an eye on whether HM Treasury makes its first formal designations of major AI and cloud providers as critical third parties. Ministers have said decisions are expected this year, and any designation will affect the contractual and operational standards firms need to meet when using those providers indirectly through their software stack.

Sources: FT Adviser, Professional Adviser, FinTech Global, EY, FCA.org.uk, Money Marketing, web search. Compiled 24 April 2026.