Britons lack the financial understanding to take the best decisions for them, the chief executive of Quilter has claimed.
Speaking at a panel event organised by financial education charity MyBnk, which was celebrating its 10-year partnership with Quilter, Steven Levin said Britain was not a "nation of investors" and did not have the financial knowledge skills or easy access to advice to help.
He told delegates: "The need for financial education is clear. Everyone can see that. There are so many proof points to this: a lack of financial resilience, financial capability, people getting into debt. This demonstrates the importance of advice.
"We are a business for advice and there is a huge advice gap in the UK. There are too few advisers, so it is difficult to access advice. The thresholds at which advisers take on clients are very high, which has effectively taken a huge proportion of the population out of advice."
He said the advice guidance boundary review, which the regulator is working on, was "absolutely critical".
Last year, the FCA's financial lives survey reported that 7.4mn people had unsuccessfully attempted to contact one or more of their financial services providers in the 12 months.
Even people with money tend to take inappropriate investment strategies, he warned, pointing out that many of these people will let their pots sit in cash and at risk from the eroding power of inflation.
This was a point pressed home by the FCA in 2022, when it urged providers to warn non-workplace pension clients they were holding too much in cash instead of investing in assets that could help ensure a better financial outcome.
Widespread knowledge gaps
Also on the panel was Ola Majekodunmi, founder of All Things Money who agreed there was a "huge lack of knowledge across the country".
She said: "Things which seem basic to us, such as investing for a better outcome, generally people don't have that knowledge".
She said one of her most viral TikTok videos was one she had made when she explained what income tax brackets were.
"People just didn't know what their bracket was and how much tax they were paying.... We are privileged to have this knowledge but generally people don't have that."
Fellow panellists Raja Moussaoui, interim executive director for the FT's charity Flic, and Susannah Hume, director of evaluation at The Policy Institute, King's College - which is conducting a six-year study into financial education in the primary school curriculum - agreed there was a desperate need to improve investment knowledge and financial outcomes.
Moussaoui told delegates: "People might be fearful of investing. They watch the news, they know things are volatile, they may not have much money in the first place and don't want to risk it. So to that point, we are working hard on how to make the most appropriate interventions."
