The fifth act of advice takes shape
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SEI’s Shauna Mace argues the next era of advice will reward judgment, context, and human connection over the outputs machines now produce
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THE FINANCIAL advice industry has reinvented itself before. Over the past five decades, it has moved through distinct phases − from stockbrokers delivering access and alpha, to advisors focused on portfolio construction, to planners expanding into holistic financial guidance, and ultimately to wealth managers integrating investments with more complex client needs. Each act was shaped by shifts in regulation, technology, and investor expectations: from deregulation and indexing to the rise of digital platforms and robo-advice.
But according to Shauna Mace, head of practice management at SEI, the current moment is different in kind, not just degree. She calls it the fifth act: a structural inflection point at which the advisor’s role is being fundamentally redefined, and where the firms that fail to adapt risk being left behind − not by technology but by their own inertia.
“The state of the world is the fastest it’s ever been and the slowest it will ever be,” Mace says, quoting Sneha Shah, chief AI strategist and head of SEI Next, the firm’s forward-looking AI strategy team. That sentiment captures both the urgency and the permanence of the change underway.
SEI (NASDAQ:SEIC) is a leading global provider of financial technology, operations, and asset management services within the financial services industry. SEI tailors its solutions and services to help clients more effectively deploy their capital − whether that’s money, time, or talent − so they can better serve their clients and achieve their growth objectives. As of March 31, 2026, SEI manages, advises, or administers approximately $1.9 trillion in assets. SEI’s end-to-end solutions can simplify the complexities of financial services and modernize clients’ technology infrastructure, reduce risk, increase efficiency, and prepare businesses for the future.
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“Advisors are exhausted. There’s this feeling of being at capacity, of struggling to keep up”
Shauna Mace,
SEI
Warning signs in plain sight The signals, Mace argues, are already visible for those willing to read them honestly. Independent broker-dealer and RIA advisors are growing at below 5 percent annually on average, while annual distributions run between 4 percent and 6 percent, meaning many firms are effectively stagnant or contracting. Meanwhile, enterprise and larger firms are growing at significantly higher rates, widening a gap that shows no sign of closing.
The issue isn’t demand − appetite for holistic, fee-based advice continues to grow. It’s capacity. Despite heavy investment in wealth technology, most firms haven’t meaningfully increased how many clients they can serve or how consistently they can serve them. Advisor teams remain constrained by aging demographics, limited succession, and thin hiring pipelines. And because client experience is still largely delivered at the individual advisor level, not systematized at the firm level, it’s difficult to replicate or scale.
“Advisors are exhausted,” Mace says. “There’s this feeling of being at capacity, of struggling to keep up.” That exhaustion, she suggests, is itself a data point: a signal that the current operating model has reached its limits.
Machines take the tasks; advisors keep the judgment Into this environment comes artificial intelligence, and with it, the familiar fear of displacement. Mace’s answer to that fear is worth examining closely, because she does not offer the reassurance most advisors are hoping for. The comfort of “AI
won’t replace you” obscures the real danger underneath it: AI will replace parts of what advisors currently do, and advisors who have built their identity on those parts may have a problem.
“AI will enhance the advisor’s ability to deliver value,” she says. “But it will absolutely change the work.”
The distinction she draws is between tasks and judgment. The tasks, including the analysis, the research, the portfolio mechanics, and a growing share of the planning work itself, are precisely the things AI gets better at every quarter. For an advisor whose value proposition rests primarily on producing those outputs, that is not an enhancement. It is an erosion.
The advisors who benefit are those whose value was never really in the tasks to begin with but in the interpretation that surrounds them: knowing which decision fits this client’s life, reading the anxiety behind a phone call, supplying the context that turns a number into a meaning.
Advisors who treat AI as a productivity tool bolted onto an unchanged business model are solving the wrong problem. The ones who recognize that the technology is redefining what clients are willing to pay a human for, and who adjust/reframe accordingly, are those positioned to come out ahead.
The human skills that cannot be outsourced Coaching advisors to lean into these human dimensions of the work requires investment in skills that the industry has historically undervalued, such as communication, active listening, emotional presence, and the ability to show up with composure during a client’s moment of anxiety. These are not soft skills in any dismissive sense; they are the core of what Mace describes as the advisor’s differentiated future.
“So much of whether you’re the advisor or on the support team is not just what you say but how you show up energetically,” she says. “People can tell.”
Role-playing difficult conversations, training for volatility scenarios, developing emotional intelligence as a professional discipline: these are practices Mace recommends building into firm culture before they are needed, not in the moment when a client is calling in a panic. The advisors who performed best through recent market dislocations, she suggests, were those who had already internalized that their job in those moments was not to explain markets but to provide stability.
Published July 27, 2026
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“AI will enhance the advisor’s ability to deliver value. But it will absolutely change the work”
Shauna Mace,
SEI
Behavior Did clients make better financial decisions because of your advice? Staying invested during volatility can be as valuable as investment returns.
Three metrics that matter as much as performance
Progress Measure movement toward life goals, not just portfolio growth. Retirement readiness, education funding, and succession planning create more meaningful conversations.
Experience Track consistency, responsiveness, personalization, and referrals. Client trust is increasingly measured not simply by investment performance but by the quality of the relationship.
Investment solutions Custom portfolios and tailored strategies designed to complement your advisory approach
A connected ecosystem for modern advisors
Technology Modern, open-architecture ecosystem that enhances your workflow and scales your operations
SEI integrates the core capabilities advisors rely on every day, helping simplify complexity and support long-term growth
Custody Confidence and control with a trust company that doesn’t comingle investor funds
Wealth solutions Robust resources to support complex planning needs and deliver deeper value to clients
Practice management Business-building support that helps you grow, scale, and adapt
Measuring what matters Translating this outcomes orientation into practice requires a different kind of reporting and communication. Mace points to three measurement buckets that forward-thinking firms are beginning to build around.
The first is behavioral metrics: concrete evidence that the advisor helped a client make good decisions or avoid bad ones. Staying invested during a market downturn, maintaining cash flow discipline, or resisting the impulse to sell at the wrong moment have measurable consequences. Advisors who close the loop on them, who go back and show clients the impact of staying the course, are building a case for their value that a performance report alone cannot make.
The second is progress metrics: tracking not just portfolio returns but movement toward specific, named goals. The distinction matters psychologically. A client who understands that their portfolio is on track to fund a specific retirement date, a child’s education, or a business transition thinks about their financial life differently than one who only sees an account balance.
The third is experience metrics: consistency of communication, personalization, response time, and sentiment. Referral rates, Mace notes, are a particularly telling signal, one that lets advisors gauge engagement without having to ask clients directly how they feel. In Mace’s framing, a book where 7 to 10 percent or more of clients refer annually signals strong trust.
Three strategic decisions for leaders: what the fifth act requires Mace offers a framework built around three decisions she believes are foundational to modernizing without losing identity.
The first is partnership. No firm, she argues, can traverse this transformation alone. The right partners, whether a broker-dealer, a custodian, an outsourced investment provider, or an enterprise firm, provide not just operational support but
access to infrastructure, thought leadership, and the capacity to adapt faster than any single firm could on its own. The question, she says, is not how to do this but who will help you do it.
The second is specialization. Firms that try to serve everyone will struggle to serve anyone well, particularly as client expectations rise and the competition for advisor attention intensifies. Narrowing focus to a specific client profile, not just by demographics but by values, communication preferences, and the role they want an advisor to play, creates the conditions for the kind of deep, personalized relationship that AI cannot replicate.
The third is infrastructure. Technology and operations need to be deliberately designed to amplify the human elements of the advice relationship, not to replace them. Incorporating AI into workflow is not an endpoint but a lever. The question is whether the infrastructure is built in service of the advisor’s capacity to connect or in spite of it.
The through line in Mace’s argument is that the fifth act is not a technological transformation. It is a human one. The advisors who will thrive are those willing to ask honestly what their true value is, not just today but in the world that is coming, and to adapt their businesses, their skills, and their client relationships accordingly.