Why Every IFA Should Be Having the Estate Planning Conversation

If you're an IFA and your client review process doesn't include a question about wills, trusts or powers of attorney, there's a gap in your advice — and, sooner or later, a competitor or well-meaning relative will fill it for you.

Estate planning isn't an add-on. It's the other half of the plan.

Financial planning is, at its core, about making sure money does what a client wants it to do, when they need it to. Pensions, protection, investments — all of it is built around outcomes: retirement income, a paid-off mortgage, security for a family.

But none of that planning accounts for what happens on death, unless a will and the right legal structures are in place. A meticulously built pension and investment portfolio can still end up distributed according to the rigid, one-size-fits-all rules of intestacy if there's no valid will — potentially bypassing a partner, a stepchild, or a chosen beneficiary entirely.

Put simply: you can build the perfect financial plan and still leave the client's family exposed, because the plan for accumulating wealth was never connected to a plan for transferring it.

The risk of staying silent

Advisers sometimes avoid the estate planning conversation because it feels adjacent to legal advice, or because it seems like scope creep beyond the regulated investment and protection work they're paid for. That instinct is understandable — but it carries a real cost.

The client goes elsewhere for it. When a client eventually does think about their will — often prompted by a health scare, a bereavement in their circle, or simply getting older — they'll ask someone. If it isn't you, it's a solicitor, an online will-writing service, or a friend's recommendation. That's a lost touchpoint, and often the start of the client relationship drifting toward whoever did have the conversation.
The relationship erodes. Clients increasingly expect their adviser to see the whole picture. A client who discovers, after the fact, that their adviser never mentioned their will was decades out of date — or never existed — reasonably wonders what else got missed.
Intergenerational assets walk out the door. Advisers lose a striking proportion of assets under management when the original client dies and the next generation moves the money, often because they have no relationship with the adviser at all. Estate planning conversations are one of the few natural ways to bring the next generation into the room before that transition happens.

When to raise it

The estate planning conversation doesn't need its own dedicated meeting or awkward pivot. It fits naturally into moments you're already having:

Protection reviews. If you're discussing life cover, critical illness or income protection, the next logical question is: who does this money go to, and how quickly can they access it? That's a will and LPA question as much as a protection question.
Retirement planning. As clients approach or enter retirement, conversations naturally turn to later life — care costs, mental capacity, and what happens if a spouse predeceases them. This is the single best entry point for LPAs (property & financial affairs, and health & welfare).
Intergenerational wealth transfer. Any conversation about gifting, inheritance tax planning, or trusts for grandchildren is, by definition, an estate planning conversation. If you're already discussing IHT exposure, you're one short step from discussing the will and trust structures that action it.
Life events. New relationship, divorce, house purchase, new child, bereavement — all standard triggers for a will review that most advisers already flag informally. The difference is having somewhere concrete to send the client.

Removing the delivery burden

The reason many IFAs stop short of actually facilitating estate planning — even when they're comfortable raising it — is the delivery problem. Drafting wills, structuring trusts and preparing LPAs is specialist legal work, and building that capability in-house is neither efficient nor, for most firms, compliant with their permissions.

This is exactly the gap Spark Solutions is built to close. As a financial services partner, you raise the conversation and make the introduction; your branded platform takes the client through a guided wizard for wills, trusts and LPAs, with the legal delivery handled outside your own regulated activity. You keep the relationship, add a genuine revenue line, and remove the risk of a client discovering — from someone else — that this side of their planning was left unaddressed.

What this looks like in practice

A typical pattern for firms that adopt this well:

The estate planning question is added as a standard item in annual review meeting notes, not an optional extra.
Protection and retirement conversations end with a specific, concrete next step ("let's get your will and LPAs sorted through the portal") rather than a vague recommendation to "see a solicitor at some point."
The adviser's branded platform link is shared directly, so the client completes the process without leaving the relationship.

None of this requires new qualifications, new compliance permissions, or new staff. It requires deciding that estate planning is part of the advice you give, not a favour you occasionally mention.

See it working

If you want to see how the client-facing side of this actually looks — the branded portal, the guided wizard, how it fits around your existing review process — book a free demo or read more about how the platform is built for financial services professionals.