As I promised a little while ago, this is my promised: ‘What do we do much better than before’ article. Instead of a very long list (which it would be), I want to focus on four connected and fundamental things.

The first thing – the bedrock if you like – is that the advice and service we give clients today is simply light years ahead of anything that was happening 40 years ago.

It's so different, it feels like a different profession. And, in many ways, it is.

Freed of the ‘selling product’ mindset, Advisers and Planners alike have made their advice the product and pretty much universally have adopted business models that are truly client-centric, rather than just claim they are.

We can debate the degree to which the regulator has driven this change, but RDR was certainly a part of that transition.

We can see the effect of this. There was a headline figure recently that the FOS received 141,846 complaints, a significant increase on the previous period. But none of the reporting that I read also said that only 2,587 of those were anything to do with investments, and fewer than 40% were upheld.

The reality is that proper Advice and Planning firms have very, very few upheld complaints. That is welcome progress.

Adviser firms now have tangible capital value. They never used to – the value was in product manufacturing. That situation has massively changed, again reflecting the fact that the value to the consumer is in the advice, not the product.

In turn, that has led to a significant switch in who the 'thought leaders' are in our sector. It’s now Advisers, or those that support them. It's Verve, Next Gen, Timeline, Brett Davidson, Humans Under Management, The Real Adviser Podcast and Yardstick and others.

You don’t have to agree with everything they say, but how much better to hear from them than some corporate ‘head of distribution’, who would not actually recognise one of his – and it was always a ‘his’ – clients if he walked into one in the street. He had never given advice, never run a business but felt entitled to tell the rest of us how to do it.

And the outcome of the three things above is that we are seeing more and more younger people coming into the profession on purpose – not as a ‘distress purchase’ when their ‘proper job’ lets them down. That has to be good news, especially as many more of the younger entrants are female, reflecting the fact that women are projected to hold some 60% of UK assets.

So is everything in the garden rosy? Are we at the end of history? Not quite. The price of our continued success is our continued vigilance over our clients' safety.

The bad guys still want our clients' money and some are not fussy if that’s done legally or not. AI will certainly empower both legal and illegal attempts to separate our clients from their wealth. Our key and most important role is to protect clients from those efforts. Failure to do so could mean that in 10 or 15 years time, these will be looked back on as ‘The Good Old Days’, before it all went wrong.

But what a great position we are now in. I’m very glad to have seen it.

Phil Billingham FPFS CFP Chartered Financial Planner, Chartered Fellow (Financial Planning) is a Financial Planner and a director of Perceptive Planning, a Chartered Financial Planning firm based in London and Essex. https://www.perceptiveplanning.co.uk/

Biography: Phil joined the profession in 1982 and is a past director of the Institute of Financial Planning (IFP) which merged with the CISI in 2015. He is a past member of the Financial Planning Standards Board (FPSB) Regulatory Advisory Panel. He is a specialist in helping advisers cope with regulatory change and has worked with advisers, planners and regulators in the UK, Europe, USA, Canada, South Africa and Australia. He writes this column most months for Financial Planning Today.