Why Do So Few Britons Take Regulated Financial Advice?

Fewer than one in ten UK adults received regulated financial advice about pensions or investments in the past year, according to the FCA’s Financial Lives survey. That’s a tiny number. Millions of people make real financial decisions every week, often with significant sums on the line, and the vast majority do it without any professional input at all. The FCA estimates around 23 million adults are underserved by the advice and guidance markets, with roughly seven million of them holding £10,000 or more in cash savings that could work harder for them somewhere else.

Nearly one in five investors now turn to social media for answers instead. What keeps everyone else from getting proper advice, and will the FCA’s targeted support regime actually do anything about it?

The Cost Barrier That Isn’t Always a Barrier

Cost comes up first, almost every time. Ask someone why they haven’t spoken to a financial adviser and chances are they’ll say it’s too expensive, or that the whole thing is really only for people with serious money. A full financial review won’t be cheap, true enough. But many people overestimate what they’d actually pay, and plenty don’t realise that most firms won’t charge anything for the initial conversation. They’ve simply never looked into it.

There’s a knowledge gap too. Most people don’t know what a financial adviser would actually do for them, or what kind of questions they’d even bring to a first meeting. That uncertainty puts them off. If you’ve never had a pension review or thought about how your investments interact with your tax position, it’s easy to assume the whole process was designed for someone else.

Who Actually Benefits from Regulated Advice?

Regulated advice won’t help everyone in the same way. Someone with a single workplace pension and a savings account can probably get by with generic guidance. But finances get complicated, and once that happens, the value of financial planning advice becomes a much more valuable tool. That’s because decisions about pension drawdown affect tax bills and gifting to children can create inheritance tax problems, and all of these things interact in ways that generic guidance simply can’t account for. One wrong call can cost thousands of pounds.

The FCA calls this group out specifically. They have enough wealth and enough complexity for professional advice to make a real difference, but they’ve never gone and got it.

Social Media Fills the Vacuum

Without advice, people will look elsewhere. Nearly one in five investors now turn to social media for guidance on financial decisions, and that includes everything from TikTok videos about ISA strategies to Reddit threads on pension transfers. Some of it is genuinely helpful. But a lot of it isn’t, and none of it comes with the consumer protections attached to regulated advice, like the ability to complain to the Financial Ombudsman or claim through the FSCS when something goes wrong.

People educating themselves online is fine on its own. The danger comes when someone makes a big, irreversible decision, like pulling a taxable lump sum out of their pension or piling their savings into a single high-risk investment, based on a 60-second clip from an online creator with no qualifications and no accountability.

What the FCA’s Targeted Support Regime Changes

Back in April 2026, the FCA launched what it calls its targeted support regime, designed to bridge the gap between full regulated advice and the vague, generic guidance that was previously the only alternative. That gap was too wide. Firms with FCA permission for targeted support can now make suggestions tailored to groups of consumers who share certain characteristics, so instead of a blanket “you should consider investing” message, a pension provider could flag that someone drawing down their pot too quickly might want to rethink their withdrawal rate.

Consumers will still decide for themselves. It’s not personalised advice in any formal sense, but it’s a meaningful step up from the vague nudges that used to be the only option for people who couldn’t afford or didn’t want a full advisory relationship.

There are limits built in too. Firms won’t be able to use targeted support to nudge anyone into consolidating pensions into a particular product, which closes off the most obvious route to mis-selling.

What Targeted Support Still Can’t Fix

Targeted support will help the millions of people who currently have no real option between guidance and full advice. It won’t cover everything. When someone’s circumstances are genuinely complex, full financial planning can’t be swapped out, because pensions, tax, estate planning and investment strategy only get more tangled as wealth grows, and the way they interact carries bigger consequences with each passing year. Anyone in that position has almost certainly lost more by delaying advice than the advice itself would have cost.

Note: Investment values rise and fall, and income payments can do the same, so the amount you eventually receive may be lower than the amount invested. Past results should not be read as a guide to future results.