What If the Advice Gap Isn’t Just About Access?

My mum had access to financial advice. Like many people navigating retirement, she found it difficult to make sense of what it meant for her own situation.

She retired a few years ago, at 67, with no idea what an income stream was, why she needed one, or what to do next. She'd seen a financial planner before that. But faced with a complex decision, she couldn't absorb it in a way that connected to her life, so she never acted on any of it.

That's not a failure of the adviser she saw. I'd bet they did everything the process asked of them: the disclosure, the documentation, the compliance sign-off. But it points to a system that measures a good outcome by what's been disclosed, not by what's been understood.

In the end, she made her decisions based on fear rather than understanding. Not because she was careless, but because nothing about her situation had ever been explained in a way she could actually use.

That distinction between access and understanding is the whole reason I do this work. The industry has spent years treating the advice gap as an access problem: get more advisers in front of more people, faster. My mum's problem was never access. She sat in the room. She got the advice. The system did its job on paper. She still walked out just as lost as she walked in.

I’ve seen the other side of that problem throughout my career and during my time as a paraplanner.

An adviser might come back with one more change, one more "what if" that takes thirty seconds to ask. For me, that meant exporting the model, cleaning the data, and rebuilding the output by hand. And with more than one scenario, a single update meant redoing every one. All that work usually produced a document too complicated for a client to digest, so it just sat in the system as a compliance record.

That feeling of being given information without truly understanding it isn't foreign to me either. My first job was in the head office of an AFSL. I remember sitting across from my manager while she drew me a mind map of who was who in the industry, trustees, licensees, advisers, all connected by lines I couldn't follow. I smiled and nodded the whole time, but inside, I had no idea what she was talking about.

That's a large part of why I deliberately chose a path through client service and then paraplanning, with the intention of eventually becoming an adviser myself. I wanted exposure to different advisers, different strategies, different ways of thinking, before deciding what kind of adviser I wanted to be and who I wanted to work with.

That path was full of roadblocks and processes shaped by legacy systems that were clunky and hadn't kept pace with the way advice needed to work. I was close to walking away from the industry altogether when I saw a role advertised on LinkedIn.

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I was hired not as a paraplanner but a Business Analyst at InvestStream, and my job is to bring what I’ve learned from years inside the advice process directly into the build.

I work alongside the product and development teams, bringing a paraplanning lens to the technology: testing assumptions, challenging scenarios, looking for edge cases and pushing the system into the kinds of situations I know occur in real advice work. 

Part of my job is essentially to try to break it. Because if advisers and everyday Australians are going to rely on this infrastructure, it needs to stand up to the complexity of real financial situations, not just the straightforward ones. That approach is one of the things that immediately stood out to me at InvestStream. 

The expertise doesn’t get handed over to the engineers and checked again at the end. The people who understand the problem work alongside the people building the technology.

For most of my career, I was told to slow down. Wait my turn. Be patient. That I didn't have the right kind of experience yet to make a real contribution. Here, the expectation is different: bring what you know, challenge what doesn’t make sense and contribute now. 

That role gives me the chance to work on the exact problem that frustrated me for years - not simply by making the modelling faster for the paraplanner, but by helping make the reasoning behind it clearer to the person it is ultimately for. That's what excites me about the role SUGAI plays underneath SuperAnne. The value isn’t simply producing a number. It’s making the reasoning behind that number visible, so someone can understand not only the outcome, but the “why” behind it. 

What my mum needed was the opportunity to understand the "why" behind the advice, to see the reasoning, explore it, and make sense of it in her own time.

I have my own kids now, and I teach them about money the way no one taught me. We talk about super, interest, credit cards, all the things that feel distant until suddenly they're not. When you're eighteen, super feels fictional: decades away, locked behind a door that only opens when retirement stops being abstract and becomes your actual life. Meanwhile, you've got a phone permanently in your hand.

Imagine what it could do for a young person's financial confidence to have SuperAnne in that same pocket, somewhere to ask the question they're too shy to ask anyone else, and to see, in front of them, what a small change today could mean down the line. Sometimes seeing it is what makes it real.

That's the potential I saw in what InvestStream is building. It's bigger than any single client file. It's my mum, frozen by fear instead of guided by understanding. It's every eighteen-year-old who thinks super has nothing to do with them yet. It's people who've never been offered advice at all, and people who have, but still walked away without truly understanding what it meant for them.

At InvestStream, we're working toward something I care deeply about: not just changing how people access financial guidance, but changing how they understand it. Closing the advice gap won't just mean more people receiving advice. It will mean more people, like my mum, understanding enough to have the confidence to act. A generation of kids who will grow up with a completely different relationship with money than the ones before them because of the knowledge they will now have in their pockets.

Access matters. 

But understanding is what turns information into action.

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