“It is going to be quite exciting to make someone else feel the same way I felt when I got my mortgage,” one trainee adviser tells FT Adviser as he starts his journey into the advice profession.
Speaking to FT Adviser as part of the New Voices series, Oliver Brine, who is a trainee adviser at The Openwork Partnership, says he is excited to be moving through his extensive adviser training.
“We’re going through the R0 exams to be wealth advisers, which currently is on track for February next year,” he details.
This is Brine’s second career as before he joined Openwork he ran a bar in a hotel called The Vineyard.
“I joined there as the bar supervisor initially because I had just left university. After about two months I had changed it into a way I’d want a bar to be run.”
However, Brine was inspired to change professions after his interaction with a mortgage broker.
“In December 2024 my partner and I were looking at getting a mortgage. We’d found a flat that we really wanted to go for,” he recalls.
“I spoke to a mortgage adviser after we found our property and he was really good. I was genuinely worried about the process as my partner and I were clueless going into it, but he was fantastic.
“He explained everything really clearly, made the process almost seamless for us, and after that I realised that I quite liked the idea of doing mortgage advice.”
He then “took a little bit of a leap” by applying to Openwork because he had been toying with the idea for so long.
“Each step of the process was more nerve racking than the last but at the same time more exciting.”
As a result of the influence of his mortgage broker, Brine identifies providing assistance to potential clients as the part of his career he is most interested in.
“It is going to be quite exciting to make someone else feel the same way I felt when I got my mortgage,” he says.
“It’s that same kind of thing where they’re going to come looking for support and I get to give that to them.
“I haven’t really had a feeling like that since we had clients come to the hotel for special occasions like a wedding, it was always nice to feel that they left a bit happier. That’s how we felt when we got our keys.”
Education
Brine shares his thoughts on how the advice profession could improve to attract more people like himself into seeing it as a potential career, specifically identifying the issue of education.
“I didn’t know much about financial services until I started to research it. I feel like it isn’t talked about enough and having it vocalised is a really good thing,” he states.
“I wish I knew about stuff like this in school because it probably would have tailored where I went to university or what I looked at.”
Having greater education around the industry would have benefited him immensely, Brine said, stating he had always found finance an interesting topic but did not know what avenue to take to pursue it.
“I always used to be quite good with money as a teenager. I always liked the idea of it but, due to the lack of education around this industry, I had no idea how to get into it.
“I felt like that until I came across this opportunity.”
If you would like to be featured in our New Voices series, or you know someone who would be a good fit please get in touch with Tom Dunstan at tom.dunstan@ft.com