Conductors, Not Quarterbacks

A long-tortured analogy in many professions is that they like to see themselves as the quarterback for their client’s needs. Lawyer? Quarterback. Accountant? Quarterback. Massage therapist? Second string quarterback. Financial planners have been no different, but give that the profession grew out of a hybrid of investment, tax, insurance, and legal knowledge, we’ve perhaps had a slightly better claim to the role, albeit one that immediately fades as a client’s legal needs or tax representation needs come to the forefront.

To be honest, I’ve never quite liked the analogy, but I’ve lacked a reasonable alternative. General? Far too grandiose. Squad leader? Not enough yelling, nor nearly enough time spent laying out gear at 3 am for a 5 am formation before the unit gets ready to leave at 7 am and then departs at 1 pm. So that tortured analogy of “quarterback” has stuck. Yet, today, I’ve finally gotten a glimpse into a better analogy: the conductor.

Reading this past weekend’s Atlantic article by Matthew Aucoin, the conductor makes a great deal of sense. Not only because of the legacy role of coordinating disparate groups into serving one unified purpose. But because the history of the conductor is what led it to necessity; large orchestral groups of hundreds of musicians didn’t really become a thing before conductors also came to be, because the conductor was there to help unify and harmonize what were once small groups of musicians into company-sized elements of professionals all trying to create the same beautiful thing.

This analogy of the conductor becomes more relevant today as I’ve spent the past few days at an offsite advisory board meeting for a financial technology company. The content of the discussion itself is under a non-disclosure agreement, so I won’t be sharing any specifics; suffice it to say that I’ve had the opportunity to see what that next generation of financial planning will really look like in practice. It comes with many pros but also a few cons for the legacy way that things work today and worked yesterday. Suffice it to say, it’s perhaps both a great time to get into the world of financial planning as a career, but it’s also an excellent time to retire for those who disdain change or like to keep things “as they are.”

Keep in mind, I don’t fancy myself a futurist. I’m merely sharing what it seems to me this particular corner of the world is likely to look like in the next few years; but with that thought in mind, I reserve the right to be entirely wrong, and perhaps pleasantly so. With that addressed, today we’re going to discuss what a better-enabled financial planning environment looks like, and what that means for planners, practices, and most importantly, clients.

Planners as Conductors

The key standout to me in reevaluating the planner’s role as once being quarterback but now being conductor isn’t about trying to torture a more artsy identity out of the job. It’s a recognition that as the world gets more complex and technology becomes more capable, the reasonable extension of responsibility will involve the same professionals doing more. We’ve already seen the long arc of history take us in that direction, and I see no evidence that this will stop.

Let’s look at the history of the financial planner to articulate that arc in history. Fifty years ago, financial planners came to be largely as salespeople. Learning financial planning through a then-nascent credential such as the CFP® Certification was about expanding your sales acumen. “You can sell life insurance now, sure, but imagine how much more you could sell if you could explain how it would save a client on taxes.” This eventually evolved as the field both got smarter but also more competitive with the advent of better financial technology and communication systems. Options like discount DIY broker dealers (Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and the like) removed the financial planner’s intermediating role as “procurer of financial products,” and steadily moved them in the direction of needing to base their value in the quality and comprehensiveness of their financial advice.

This same trend magnified as tools such as rebalancing software, block trading, instantaneous market research, and financial education such as college programs in financial planning became more and more ubiquitous over time. Today, a financial planner no more defines themselves by their investment acumen than they would their taste in barbecue sauce. It simply isn’t where the value is. Yet, the accumulation of tools and technology has steadily commoditized what was once central to the role and now once again threatens to change the identity of the financial planner.

There are two relevant categories of study I’ll now invoke as we look at the present and future financial planner. The first is focused on time: financial planning has traditionally been labor-intensive on the human part. While tools such as financial planning software have enhanced the speed and quality of the work of financial planners, financial planners typically spend somewhere between 15-29 hours working with clients in the first year of service and between 15-36 hours in subsequent years (Kitces, 2024). In turn, studies by organizations such as Kaplan are finding that financial advisors aren’t using the efficiency of tools such as AI to cut back on their working hours, but like financial planning software enabled before, are using the tools to go deeper and do more for their existing clients (Kaplan, 2026). As these efficiencies continue to improve and continue to deepen, we begin to run the risk that the vehicle will get going a bit too fast. So how do we deal with that?

A good example is the airplane. While human beings can drive a car going hundreds of miles an hour, particularly in a controlled environment like a speedway or a racetrack, we do not depend solely on human eyes and reflexes to fly 747s over the continent or around the world. Advanced and modern airplanes effectively fly themselves, with human pilots present both for emergencies but more so for the peace of mind of the passengers; after all, how many of us would willingly board a metal tube hurtling through the air seven miles above the earth at 600 miles per hour without knowing there was someone around who could all but guarantee our safety, and preferably in person with us to share the peril?

But the same can be said of financial planning technology. Financial planners are rapidly faced with a world in which the time-consuming tasks of financial plan data entry or portfolio trading are being expedited through innovations in technology for the space. Thus, with time consumption no longer driving some of their value for clients (e.g., time spent), their value has to be more and more in the domain of delivering value. Consequently, they will be forced to use and be equipped with more tools that run more efficiently and do more work for them. Herein I return to the point that it might be time for some planners to escape into retirement before such changes cross the line from luxury to necessity. A financial planner happily making plans in home-brewed Excel spreadsheets and Word documents will quickly find that clients have little patience for paying for hours of inefficiency and the risk of manual inaccuracy when a modern financial planner is able to deliver the same information in mere minutes through the use of well-coordinated AI agents running through a suite of cutting-edge tools. There is simply no more value in “time,” particularly when the trade is based on inefficiency and taste over actual client value.

Planning Firms as Orchestras

What does it mean then for financial planning firms if financial planners are doing more and more with every passing year, with more done by fewer people? That’s not to say financial planning firms will naturally shrink, and limitations such as Dunbar’s Number will still place a premium on the availability of human bandwidth for financial planners to know their clients well. But that means that while financial planners might soon possess the capacity to do two times as much, and then four times as much, and then eight times as much and so on for their clients, they might rapidly find that they both need less help than they used to but also cannot serve more people despite the promise of technology.

The long run of such trends is that financial planning may become even more bespoke and more of a luxury good than it already is; at least for those clients who opt to work with the financial planner at the center of their financial planning system, rather than relying on the tools. In essence, a qualified financial planner may still work with only 50-100 clients, doing a degree of work for them previously reserved for family office clients. In turn, that means that there will be less supply for “general” financial planning. But that proves a problem for service models that bill themselves on an hourly basis or by the project (even subscriptions to some extent). The negative impact to the hourly model is obvious. Consumers of hourly services will balk at rates that feel arbitrarily high, e.g., $1,000/hour, even if they only end up paying for 15 minutes ($250), rather than paying someone $250 an hour to do the same work in the course of an hour because they haven’t adopted efficiencies. And while not all project or subscription-based firms price themselves based on an hourly estimate, how does the philosophy of wanting to make $500/hour and assuming you’ll do 24-25 hours of work for clients annually hold up to a $12,500 subscription fee when technology makes all but 3 or 4 client-facing hours condense down to 1 or 2 hours annually?

However, setting aside the business model concerns that arise when time is no longer the same limiting factor in the “supply” of financial planning services to the “demand” of clients, there is also the nature of work. A decade ago, it wasn’t unheard of that an office might have one or several administrators whose sole purpose was to check the mail, scan checks, and fax wet-signed paperwork to various custodians and carriers on behalf of clients. But how much of that remains necessary when a batch of pre-configured AI agents handles all of the paperwork after a client meeting in which an AI notetaker listened, transcribed, produced the notes, and automatically kicked off a list of action items such as account openings and money movements based on the conversation that was had? What happens to the role of paraplanner when simply uploading a client’s information into the financial planning software produces the entirety of the existing plan model, with deliverable recommendations being generated with maximum risk, reward, and tax efficiency baked in from the get-go?

I’ve written before in defense of grunt work. I have built MY Wealth Planners with the aim that it serves as a teaching hospital and produces as many safe and supported entry-level positions into the profession as the firm can reasonably provide for such opportunities. Yet, it can’t be denied that the efficiencies of the tools that are rapidly being released and coming into existing platforms as enhancements are very likely to supersede more and more of the commonplace “learning tasks,” which in turn brings more importance to training and development opportunities that are more educational and less hands-on, particularly for firms that value growing their own.

What a Ticket to the Show Buys Clients

If the financial planner is serving as a conductor and their work takes the form of an orchestra of dozens or hundreds of agents working in concert to deliver an optimal financial plan for you, what really is their value proposition? It’s the same question that musicians themselves faced in the heyday of conductors coming to be. “Can we just play the music? Do we need this madman waving a stick?” I’ll admit, in the genuine musical context I’m the type of person who finds the conductor sort of superfluous, but what do I know? After all, I’m not a professional musician. And therein lies the crux of an issue that all clients face in varying degrees. How much of what a financial planner does for them was something they could have done for themselves? How much would they trust themselves if they just harnessed these tools? Is the role of the financial planner as much about putting a human face to this high-stress and high-importance thing we call money? Or is it just so we have someone to hold out to ourselves as an avatar of what financial planning buys for us? Even just someone to blame if something goes south?

I can say as a financial planner, it has always amazed me that while ostensibly it seems that everyone hires us at the outset because they want someone to “math the money” for them, whether that be through investments, taxes, or just generalized knowledge of how to fit everything together, that never seems to be the reason they stick with us. Clients who have come in defensive and cautious have eventually handed over their life savings to us. Clients who said they’d be “one and done” with financial planning stick around for years. Clients who seemed all business at the outset talk to us more like friends and therapists years on, and describe us as family in their online reviews. “We came for the music, but we didn’t expect to be moved.”

It’s humbling. But more so, it reminds me that no matter how many digital strings I pluck and direct as a financial planner and as technology grows only more effective at creating value for my clients, that my clients ultimately value more than just what comes out in the reports or shows up on the statements. Don’t get me wrong, the value can be in both. But clients seem to value both equally more than I’d ever have expected. That, perhaps, is the crux of why I like to say I only work a few hours a week and Kaitlyn would rather pointedly tell you that I work too much. We agree to disagree.

Science & Art

It’s curious to think that years ago, Dr. Dave Yeske wrote that we must “Learn…like a CFP.” What he was pointing out at the time was that financial planning needed to be further exposed to academic rigor. We needed real researchers doing real research, and real financial planners to take in that research and apply it to their work for the profession to be taken seriously. That mandate remains as important today as it ever was. But notably, there’s another old expression that seems relevant here. “It’s not what clients think you know, but how much they think you care, that brings them to trust you.” I hope that’s true today, but also remains true as we become ever more efficient facilitators of the financial wellbeing of others.

Because the past few days I’ve caught a glimpse of the future. It’s shiny, new, and brilliant. A far cry from the fax machine days of 2015, for sure. But notably also, it runs the risk of dehumanizing this very human thing we do. For that measure, progress tends to grind up and spit out things that get in its way. And in that regard, I certainly hope we find ourselves following that in the niche arc of history financial planning occupies, more than we find ourselves getting in its way.