The Financial Conduct Authority needs to lead the way to improve access to advice, a chartered financial planner has said.
Olivia Bowen joined Manchester-based Castlefield in 2011 after the company bought Gaeia, the small ethical advisory practice where she was a director.
Having started at Gaeia in 1999 after graduating from Manchester University, first as an administrator then as a qualified adviser, Bowen said being a financial planner was such an "amazing" career for young people to consider.
But she warned that unless the government and regulator "led" the way, then her two passions - sustainable investing and financial planning - would not get the traction that is needed.
Indeed, she believes those two strands - sustainability and planning - go hand-in-hand with getting more young people into the profession to help close the advice gap. However, she said there was still too little being done "at the top" to make this a reality.
Speaking to FTAdviser, Bowen said: "I have only ever worked in ethical investment and financial planning. I have seen, over the past two decades, attitudes towards sustainable investing change significantly within our profession and among advised clients.
"But people in general are used to doing what they have always done. If we had more younger advisers coming through, we would have seen a more strategic regulatory attitude to both closing the advice gap and promoting sustainable investment.
"The government and regulator need to lead in many areas of society. In general, it is quite typical that you only get a big change if people are forced to change their habits.
"The most important thing is that a drive to improve sustainable disclosure should have happened before. It would have been good for the regulator to get onto this a couple of years or even a decade or so."
Consumer duty
Bowen welcomed the incoming sustainability disclosure requirements, which are expected to be set out in detail later this year.
As reported by FTAdviser, commentators had expressed disappointment at what they felt was a delay to the implementation, although Castlefield is more sanguine believing this is a sign that the regulator is thinking things through carefully.
However, in the meantime, Bowen said other changes, such as the new consumer duty regulation, would help to promote questions of sustainability and values-based investing at the start of client conversations.
She said: "Clearly, as an industry, we have to know our clients. So, if you know your client you should already be asking them about how they want to invest, and whether values-based investing is important to them.
"We should have been doing that already, regardless of consumer duty."
