With social media increasingly influencing client thinking, Amy North, Head of Client Accounts at We Complement, explores the subtle suitability risks, as well as the opportunities that advice professionals have to achieve better client outcomes.
I watched the Louis Theroux documentary recently. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know the kind of thing. Fast money. Absolute certainty. Big statements, no hesitation.
And to be fair, parts of it were convincing. The lifestyle, the confidence, the clarity.
You can see how people buy into it But at the same time, it didn’t feel particularly grounded – more like a group reinforcing the same ideas to each other.
And it made me think about what happens when that kind of influence carries into financial advice.
Because if you’re just seeing the content, it does look like knowledge, it sounds like knowledge and it feels like knowledge too.
But it often isn’t.
That kind of influence doesn’t stay on social media.
It follows people into real conversations. Into meetings with advisers. Into the way questions are asked, and sometimes the answers that are already half-formed.
Recent research suggests younger clients are increasingly turning to social media during major financial decisions, including buying a home.
Which means many conversations are starting long before an adviser is involved.
It rarely shows up explicitly.
No one says, “I saw this on TikTok”.
Instead, it comes through more subtly.
A client already leaning towards a strategy. Already confident in a direction, forming conclusions before the advice process has really started.
For advisers, that changes the dynamic.
For paraplanners, it often shows up later, in the file.
You’re not in the room when those ideas are formed. You are working from the output of those conversations and helping turn them into something that needs to stand up, make sense, and be defensible.
You’ll recognise some of the signals:
- Confidence that outweighs understanding
- Very fixed ideas about specific strategies
- Language that feels familiar, but slightly detached
On their own, they don’t mean much but together they start to tell a story.
Sometimes everything still works. The recommendation fits, the file is clean and the outcome is suitable.
But the outcome underneath feels thin.
Case in practice
A client expresses a clear preference for a specific investment approach they’ve been following online.
The objectives reflect this. The risk profile supports it. The recommendation technically fits.
But when the adviser revisits the reasoning, the client struggles to explain how the strategy aligns to their wider circumstances.
The initial conversation had been confident, but not fully informed.
That creates a challenge.
Because under Consumer Duty, it’s not enough for the recommendation to fit, it needs to be evidenced that the client’s objectives are genuinely understood and informed.
A small gap in understanding becomes a much bigger gap in evidencing suitability.
And this is where things are evolving further.
Increasingly, those conversations are being captured and processed through AI.
Meeting notes generated automatically. Objectives, risk, vulnerabilities, all written up for you.
On the face of it, that’s a huge step forward.
But it also means you’re often working from a version of the conversation that’s already been shaped twice.
First by social media. Then by AI.
AI doesn’t challenge the conversation, it reflects it.
So, if the input is biased, incomplete, or overconfident, the output will be too, just more structured.
That creates a subtle but important suitability risk.
Suitability isn’t just about whether the recommendation fits.
It’s about whether the reasoning behind it can be evidenced.
From a Consumer Duty perspective, we’re responsible not just for the outcome, but for demonstrating that the client’s objectives are genuinely understood and informed.
If those objectives have been shaped elsewhere and not properly explored, there’s a risk that suitability is built on assumptions rather than understanding.
In practice, this doesn’t mean adding complexity.
It’s often something simple.
Slowing the process down slightly.
Asking one more question. Understanding where the client’s thinking has come from, not just what it is.
A useful shift is focusing less on what the client wants, and more on why.
Because that “why” often reveals whether the understanding is real, or just repeated.
The reality is, clients aren’t always starting from a neutral place anymore.
They’re arriving with ideas shaped elsewhere, reinforced before they’ve even spoken to an adviser.
And increasingly, those ideas are being captured, structured, and passed through the advice process before they’ve been fully tested.
For firms, that creates both a risk and an opportunity.
The risk is clear.
Suitability built on partially formed understanding is harder to evidence, and harder to defend.
But the opportunity is just as important in bringing clarity where there is noise, to challenge where confidence outpaces understanding and to help clients move from assumption to informed decision making.
Because in the end, that’s what good advice does.
Not just validate what a client already thinks.
But make sure it actually stands up.
Main image: dlxmedia-hu-rzBfJ6sMmzA-unsplash
