For decades, the investment industry had a fairly comfortable playbook. Build a diversified portfolio, own stocks and bonds, beat the benchmark if you can, keep costs reasonable and let falling interest rates and rising asset prices do a lot of the heavy lifting. Som Seif, CEO and founder of Purpose Investments, believes that world has changed, and if the investment environment has changed, he argues, the role of the advisor has to change with it1.
The first part of that shift starts with the portfolio itself. For much of the last 40 years, the traditional 60/40 portfolio benefited from a long decline in interest rates. Bonds provided income, diversification and, in many periods, capital gains when rates fell, while equities benefited from the same broader environment. That relationship looked far less dependable in 2022, when both stocks and bonds declined together. For Seif, that was not simply a bad year. It exposed a weakness in the way many investors had come to think about diversification. A resilient portfolio cannot be built around the assumption that one asset class will always rescue another. It has to be built for different scenarios.
That means thinking more carefully about what actually drives each part of a portfolio, and how those pieces behave when inflation, interest rates, growth or market stress move in unexpected directions. Seif argues that bonds still matter, but passive exposure alone may no longer be enough. Active fixed income, alternative credit, hedging strategies, derivatives, real assets, gold and even assets such as crypto may all have roles to play depending on the investor and the problem the portfolio is trying to solve. The goal is not to own everything. It is to own assets for a reason. A resilient portfolio should be able to absorb different environments rather than being optimized for the one investors hope will occur.
That leads to a broader question. If portfolio construction itself is becoming easier to access, cheaper and increasingly commoditized, where does the advisor create value? For Seif, the answer is not better access to markets. It is helping clients answer a far more personal question: am I going to be okay? That sounds simple, but it changes almost everything about the advice business.
From Portfolio Manager to Accountability Partner
Seif compares the advisor of the future to a personal trainer. A personal trainer is not valuable because no one else knows how to do a squat. The value comes from showing up, creating structure, holding someone accountable and helping them stay on track toward an outcome they care about, and Seif believes advisors should think about themselves in much the same way.
The portfolio still matters, and investment expertise still matters. Years spent building a sophisticated investment process are not wasted. But those things increasingly become the infrastructure beneath the relationship rather than the relationship itself. The real value is helping clients understand where they are, where they are trying to go and whether they remain on track to get there. That means financial planning cannot simply be something completed during onboarding, placed in a drawer and revisited every year or two. The plan has to become the centre of the relationship. The portfolio should flow from it, the reporting should connect back to it, and client conversations should spend less time explaining what happened in markets and more time answering whether those market movements actually changed the client's ability to reach their goals. Seif puts it plainly: spend five minutes talking about portfolio decisions and 55 minutes talking about the plan.
That is a very different client experience from the one much of the industry was built around. Traditional statements still tend to show accounts, holdings, performance and transactions. They show the plumbing. What clients really want to know is whether they are ahead of plan, behind plan or still on track. Retirement, taxes, estate planning, business succession, saving, family goals, income, spending. Those are the things that determine whether someone feels financially secure. Performance matters because it serves those outcomes, not because beating a benchmark is an outcome in itself.
Seif believes this shift is also the best response to fee pressure. If an investor can buy a diversified portfolio online for a fraction of what full-service advice costs, it becomes difficult to justify a higher fee purely through portfolio construction. But people will pay for something they genuinely value. They will pay for guidance, for clarity and for someone who understands their situation and stays with them through decades of financial decisions. That is why Seif does not believe the value of advice is falling. He believes it can increase. But advisors have to stop anchoring their value proposition to something that is becoming easier for clients to obtain elsewhere.
There is also a lesson here for the investment side of the business. The portfolios themselves cannot remain anchored to the past either. Seif points to Canada as one example. Years of U.S. outperformance have pushed many Canadian portfolios toward increasingly large U.S. equity allocations, which made sense when American companies dominated intellectual property, technology and globalization. But the world is changing. Geopolitics, AI, infrastructure, energy, resources and a renewed focus on domestic economic resilience could create a very different opportunity set over the next decade. Seif describes it as a shift from "atoms to bytes" and, in some ways, back toward atoms again. Physical infrastructure, resources, energy and the inputs required to build the next generation of technology may matter more than they did during the previous era.
None of that guarantees Canadian outperformance, but it reinforces Seif's larger point. Investors and advisors cannot simply assume the next 20 years will behave like the last 20. The portfolio has to evolve, the advice model has to evolve, and the industry has to become more focused on the outcome the client actually cares about. Not whether the S&P 500 was beaten by 50 basis points, not whether a bond manager outperformed an index, but whether the client can look at their financial life and feel confident about the answer to one question: am I going to be okay?
Listen to the full conversation with Som Seif on Insight is Capital for a deeper discussion on resilient portfolios, the limits of 60/40, Canada's investment opportunity, fee pressure and why the future of financial advice may depend less on managing money and more on helping people stay on track.
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Footnote:
1 "Returns Are a Commodity—Stop Selling the Plumbing." AdvisorAnalyst, 28 July 2026.
