So what would you say is the biggest difference between when you were seeking advice and now?
“The consumer duty came into play, but to be honest, my personal opinion is that actually everyone should have adhered to those standards even before it came into play - from an ethical perspective really.
“I suppose that sort of came into play in between me applying and practising,” she said.
“In practice it didn't really make any difference because I was already thinking about all of those things anyway, but I think one of the biggest issues with the financial advice industry is that a lot of people don't trust financial advisers and that's something I've really like tried to tackle in the way that I work.”
Meller said she has “100 per cent transparency” of her fees by having them on her website for everyone to look up.
“It is quite an unusual thing to do,” she said.
“One of the other things with that is traditionally, a lot of people think that financial advisers are only for people who are very wealthy, but I've tried to kind of break that barrier by having a very low initial fee for a one off report.”
Given you recently started out, can you name one to three things that you would’ve liked more help on?
“Well only 17 per cent of approved FCA individuals are women so there's a huge lack of local women mentors as well,” she said.
“Obviously when you're starting your own business, that's like a major need so at the start, even within my network, there's quite a few women but still a lot less than men and finding the right mentor and realising that that's something that you need.”
She explained money mindsets were shaped early on - at seven years old - and from that point onwards, men and women have different language, and are presented with, different language about investing.
“So actually, it's really helpful for women to have a female financial adviser so that they can have the language that they can understand and also have somebody who has the patience and empathy to really go through the issues that they are currently facing in their lives.”
What would you say are the biggest challenges facing new business owners today?
Meller said the hardest thing when coming from the outside was establishing how to go about starting your first position in the industry.
“What happens most of the time is actually that people just join us as paraplanners,” she said.
“And unfortunately, there's loads of statistics that show that women often stay paraplanners rather than going on to become financial advisers.”
She said one of the difficulties was financing the exams, especially if starting a business from scratch as well.
