If financial services had an oath, perhaps it should be this: ‘First protect’.
Medicine is associated with the principle of ‘first, do no harm’. It is not literally the Hippocratic Oath, although many assume it is. Still, the idea has endured because it captures something important about the responsibilities of a profession that deals with human vulnerability.
Financial services might benefit from a similar principle, ensuring adequate protection is the key starting point. This isn’t because it is more risky than other products such as investments or pensions. Quite the opposite, really. Protection tends to sit in the background, unnoticed until the moment it is needed.
A lack of financial resilience can go unnoticed, until something goes wrong: illness, job loss, a relationship ending or a parent becoming dependent. As any adviser knows, life has a habit of arriving unannounced and full of consequence. But protection is still often treated as a secondary conversation, something to revisit once the ‘real’ planning has been done. That always feels backwards to me.
Individuals often make decisions based on immediate need, and might pay little heed to protection. But advisers and those working in financial services can spot these risks long before consumers do themselves. We spend our time around the consequences of poor resilience, be it families trying to cope after illness, households discovering how quickly stability disappears when income stops or retirements knocked off course by events that happened years earlier.
Imagine a person in the desert, tired and dehydrated. If somebody offers a caffeinated fizzy drink, they buy it. It might provide instant refreshment. But it’s the wrong product at that time. It solves the immediate thirst, not the underlying problem, and could exacerbate issues longer-term.
Unfortunately the financial services industry can sometimes drift into this habit. We can be good at offering what feels appealing in the moment: growth stories, market participation, future wealth. None of these things are wrong. Most are valuable. But there is an order to things, as with our desert wanderer.
Protection is similarly foundational. Income protection, life insurance, emergency savings, support structures at work, practical guidance at difficult moments. They create enough stability for people to think clearly about everything else. And this is where employers have a particularly important role.
For many people, their employer is one of the few large institutions they still interact with regularly and with a degree of familiarity and trust. Edelman’s Trust Barometer for example has found employees place higher levels of trust in their employer than in government, media or business more broadly. In uncertain periods, many look to the workplace for reassurance and practical support.
That creates an opportunity for corporate advice professionals to reach people who might otherwise remain outside the system entirely. If the person in the desert cannot find us, perhaps the answer is to reach them through somebody they recognise and trust. The workplace can become the first point of contact. Not a sales channel. Something more useful than that. A route towards safety.
Sometimes that means putting meaningful protection benefits in place before introducing more sophisticated financial products. Sometimes it means identifying moments when people are more vulnerable and likely to need support. This might be new parents, those returning to work after illness, an employee quietly struggling with debt, or those approaching retirement with little confidence about what comes next.
Targeted support matters here. Not in the sense of aggressive personalisation or endless nudging, but in building sensible pathwaysfor groups of people with similar characteristics and needs that help people move towards
better decisions. Auto-enrolment showed what can happen when good structures are built around ordinary behaviour. Millions of people now save for retirement who probably would not otherwise have done so. Pathways were simplified and participation became easier.
Protection deserves similar thinking. As a society, there should be a shared interest in making sure people are not exposed when things go wrong. Public policy has a role in that and employers do too. So does the financial services industry itself. The order matters, though. Shelter first. Then water. Then a route forward. Everything else has a better chance of succeeding once those foundations are in place.