Founding Adviser

Towpath is a new financial advice firm, and we're getting ready to serve our first customers in 2027. So we're hiring our first advisers.

Hello from the founders

We're the three founders of Otta, the job search platform on a mission to make job search less soul-crushing. We grew it to over 2 million users in the UK and US before being acquired in 2024.

We knew we wanted to build something together again, and that it had to make a real difference to people's lives. We kept coming back to the same place: how people make their biggest money decisions.

We don't come from financial advice, so we've spent the last year learning the industry in depth. Two of us have passed the Level 4 exams to be able to advise customers. We've spent hundreds of hours with advisers, firm owners, compliance experts, and people with and without an adviser. Long enough to know how it works, not long enough to have stopped questioning the status quo.

We've taken investment from LocalGlobe, an early stage technology investor that was Otta's earliest backer. Individual investors include leaders from breakout companies like Monzo, Wise and Deliveroo, and Europe's biggest financial institutions, such as UBS, Santander and Julius Baer.

• Sam Franklin on LinkedIn
• Theo Margolius on LinkedIn
• Xav Kearney on LinkedIn

What we're building

We're starting with people coming up to retirement or already retired, as it's the life stage with the most complex money decisions.

Our quality bar is simple: a service we'd be proud to recommend to our parents. We've sat in meetings with our parents, and unfortunately they've fallen into the hands of mediocre advisers. The hour goes on how the portfolio performs. And none of their important questions are answered. Do they need to downsize? Have they got enough if one of them needs care? They leave, every time, with the questions that keep them up at night still unanswered.

Many of the best firms have already moved past that, from financial advice to financial planning, weaving in the rest of someone's life: the house, the spending, protecting the family.

We want to take it a step further, and help with big money decisions and the weight that surrounds them. Not just what someone should do with their money, but how they think and feel about it. Helping the couple who've stopped talking about retirement because it keeps turning into a disagreement. Working out with someone how much they can really afford to give their children, and how they feel about giving it. Helping someone with a comfortable pension find the confidence to actually spend it.

The best advisers we've met already do this. They want to talk about someone's life before their portfolio. They ask the hard questions. But they mostly do it in the margins, in spite of how their firm expects them to work. The fact-find they're asked to follow doesn't ask how someone feels about money. The meeting runs out of time and follow-ups aren't encouraged. And nobody measures whether a customer feels good about their decisions, only whether the advice was suitable and the assets grew.

People paying for a financial adviser deserve more. And we've chosen to build a financial advice firm from scratch, with our own technology. It lets us design the experience around the standard we want to deliver to customers, rather than have it squeezed into the margins.

Our ambition is to build the brand people in the UK recognise for life's big money decisions, and to bring in the many people who'd never have thought advice was for them.

The role of an adviser is being redefined

Over the last couple of years, most of us have watched AI go from a novelty to something we use every week. It drafts the email, summarises the meeting, works through the spreadsheet. Customers are already turning up having spent an hour with ChatGPT on their questions. It's early days in advice, but it's hard to imagine there not being more progress in the next five years.

We think one of the most interesting questions is what happens to the time that is freed up.

One answer is scale. Each adviser looking after more and more customers, and some people in the industry are already talking about ambitions for one adviser to cover thousands. But push that far enough, and the job becomes mostly signing off advice. That's a different job, and the relationship is what gives way. A bit like what's happened with GPs: you may see the same one, but it's rushed and they don't really know you.

We're asking a different question: what more could advisers do with the time?

For us, the answer is more time on the big money decisions and the weight that surrounds them. And people need that help more than ever. Retirement is no longer about relying on the final salary pension that paid what it paid. Someone's pension pot is now the biggest sum most people will ever be responsible for, and it has to last thirty years instead of ten. Someone in their fifties might be working out care for their parents and a deposit for their kids in the same year. And if they get it wrong, there's no one standing behind them to absorb the mistake.

We don't have the answers yet. There are plenty of questions to work through over the next few years:

• How many customers can one adviser genuinely care for?
• Which parts of the job should technology never touch?
• Where would people rather interact with technology?
• What could help look like for people who'd never think to see an adviser?

As this plays out, advisers will find themselves at one of three kinds of firm. Those that resist change. Those where technology is introduced but it's mainly a tool bolted onto how things have always been done. Or those firms that lean into the change and design what advice becomes.

We're building the third, because we think this moment is the best chance in decades to give customers advice that's significantly better. Our Founding Advisers will help shape it.

What the job involves

You'll advise people at or near retirement through their biggest money decisions. As we grow, that's where more and more of your time will go. Finding customers is our job as founders, but you'll play a part too, whether that's meeting people who are thinking about advice or helping share how we think.

In the early months your diary won't be full, and that coincides with the best period to shape the service with us. Testing new ways of doing things, from how a first meeting runs to how we stay in touch with customers between reviews. You'll be working day to day with the three of us and our early hires, and we'll be quickly iterating on new ideas, noticing what doesn't work, and going deeper on what does.

While we're small, we'll happily do things that don't scale. With fewer customers, we can go further for each one than would ever seem reasonable, and learn which of those things matter most. We take a lot of inspiration from Will Guidara, who ran Eleven Madison Park when it was named the best restaurant in the world. His book, Unreasonable Hospitality, draws a line between service and hospitality. Service is getting the food to the table right. Hospitality is how you make someone feel while you do it, and that's what people remember. In advice, that might mean ringing someone on the first Monday after they've finally retired, just to ask how it feels.

Who might suit this role

We're open-minded on career stage. You might be a few years into advising, or a senior planner with a long track record. What matters more is how you think about the job:

• You got into this for the planning, not the products
• You'd rather ask the harder question than give the easier answer
• You want your work measured by whether a customer sleeps better, not by funds under management
• You're excited rather than wary about what technology can do, and it's already changed how you work
• You want to be stretched to deliver the best service possible
• You'd rather help shape something unfinished than step into a settled role

A few practical things:

• At least Level 4 qualified, with at least a couple of years experience advising customers
• Based within reach of London, so we can spend time together in person

Salary and how we're hiring

• £60–100k salary depending on experience. The range is wide because we're open-minded on experience
• We're still designing how we incentivise advisers, but expect to have a bonus scheme in addition to the salary
• We'll offer you EMI options in the business so you have a stake in the future success. We're happy to tell you more about this through the process
• We're still working on the rest of our benefits package (e.g. health insurance) and will develop it with our early hires
• We believe in flexibility and autonomy when it comes to time in office, particularly once you're working with many customers. Initially, we'd expect you to be in the office (Clerkenwell) at least two days per week
• We'd be excited to tell you much more about our story and progress, and answer any questions you have