UK Enterprise Awards 2026 / 154 FinTech Company of the Year 2026 AdvisoryAI was built by people who have sat in the adviser's chair, who know what it is to lose evenings to suitability reports and weekends to compliance. As the firm is named FinTech Company of the Year at the UK Enterprise Awards 2026, we speak to co-founder and CEO Alan Gurung about closing the advice gap, the vision for Atlas, and why the firms that win the next decade will be the ones that scale what makes them different. AdvisoryAI is the frontier AI for UK-regulated advisory firms, now working with more than 400 firms and 2,500 users, from solo IFA practices to some of the UK's largest consolidators and networks, among them Timothy James and Partners, Finli Group and Brooks Macdonald (formerly LIFT-Financial Group). In the first quarter of 2026 alone, its platform produced over 110,000 reports for advisers and paraplanners, saving an estimated 55,000 hours at a conservative 30 minutes per report. This month, the firm was named FinTech Company of the Year at the UK Enterprise Awards 2026, run by SME News. The company was co-founded by Alan Gurung, a former financial adviser and paraplanner who once spent up to 60 per cent of his time on administration rather than sitting with clients. That experience is the reason AdvisoryAI exists. “In the UK, only 8 per cent of the population has access to financial advice,” says Gurung. “That is not because advisers do not want to help more people, but because the volume of paperwork makes it nearly impossible to scale. We want to play our part in changing that.” Because its founders are ex-advisers and paraplanners, AdvisoryAI approaches every problem from inside the firm rather than as a technology outsider looking in. Its agents draft suitability reports from each firm's own templates, turning a task that once took four to six hours into under an hour, capture meeting notes as they happen, and check every compliance file rather than the small sample most firms have time to review. Critically, the platform builds from each firm's own templates and processes rather than forcing standardisation. Ask Gurung where this is heading and the answer is Atlas, a single conversational interface across the entire firm. Instead of learning which tool does what, anyone in the firm, whether adviser, paraplanner, compliance officer or administrator, simply types what they need in plain English and Atlas routes it to the right capability. The ambition, though, runs deeper than convenience. Most AI, Gurung argues, is like a brilliant colleague with no memory. “It turns up every morning and it has amnesia. It has no context about your background, how you think, how you are planning your future.” That belief shapes everything the company builds. “The race is not faster AI, it is more context, so the AI can be better at its job.” That design has a particular resonance as the advice market consolidates. As larger groups acquire smaller practices at pace, the standard headache is forcing dozens of firms that all work differently onto one shared process. That same principle, building on how each firm already works rather than flattening it, is what lets a consolidator roll Atlas across an entire portfolio and bring every firm up to speed quickly, without erasing what makes each practice work. “The firms that win the next decade will be the ones that scale what they already do best,” says Gurung. “Their own personality, their own way of advising. That is the moat.” Gurung is candid that today's tools are only the beginning. The next chapter is an Atlas that works in the background rather than waiting to be asked. “It should not just live in the five minutes you interact with it,” he says. “It should be living and breathing 24 hours a day, working in the background to find inefficiencies. It should be able to say: you have clients you have not met in six months, do you want me to book them in? Then do the pre-meeting prep, record the meeting, and write the suitability letter.” For Gurung, that shift is the whole point. “The AI that waits for you to ask is a tool. The AI that tells you what you did not know to ask is a team member.” It is an ambitious vision, and the team behind it is growing quickly to match, with significant expansion across engineering, customer success and go-to-market over the past year and more hiring underway. For Gurung, the reason is unchanged from the day he left his own practice to build the company. “Everyone is entitled to a lawyer when they go to court, whoever they are and whatever they earn,” he says. “Financial advice should be exactly the same.” It is what the growing team is building toward: quality financial advice within reach of the millions of UK households that currently go without. About AdvisoryAI AdvisoryAI is the frontier AI for UK-regulated advisory firms. Co-founded by Alan Gurung, a former financial adviser and paraplanner, and Roshan Tamil Sellvan, CTO, the platform generates suitability reports, meeting notes, compliance checks and client intelligence from each firm's own templates and data. It works with 400+ firms and 2,500+ users and is a participant in the FCA's AI Lab. advisoryai.com Contact Ben Glass, AdvisoryAI — advisoryai.com
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUyMDQwMA==