Advisors, Beware: Computers Might Steal Your Jobs

As a financial advisor, your job may be at risk in the next decade or two.

It's not the economy that's the culprit here. Or the studies that have shown younger generations are more apt to bypass the advisor, putting traditional advisory jobs in jeopardy.

Rather, the threat stems from mobile robots and 'smart' computers, according to Oxford University researchers in the U.K..

Personal financial advisors face a 58% risk of having their jobs become automatable, according to the Oxford research. That's much worse than physicians and surgeons, who have a mere 0.4% risk, but better than loan officers, who face a 98% risk. (See infographic below for details.)

In fact, the study – which estimated the probability of computerization of more than 700 occupations – shows that job automation may threaten half of the U.S. workforce.

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"Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers and labor in production occupations, are at risk,” write the study’s co-authors, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne. “More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most U.S. job growth has occurred over the past decades, are highly susceptible to computerization.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those within the advisory industry express some skepticism about the research. Timothy Welsh, president at a wealth management consulting firm, acknowledges that some aspects of the advisory world may be more likely to become automated — such as developing financial plans, designing asset allocations, trading, managing money and generating reports. “Advisors who only provide that level of service may be on the way out," Welsh says. "In fact, many such automated services exist today and they are growing” he adds, citing sites like Betterment, Wealthfront and WiseBanyan.

The more technical aspects that wealth managers provide — such as estate planning, tax planning and inter-generational wealth transfer — should be safer from digital takeover, Welsh argues. “Just like TurboTax didn’t put the accountants out of business and Legal Zoom didn’t put the lawyers out of business, same for wealth management.”