Advisors talk more than clients in 84% of meetings

Across the nearly 12,000 meetings Jump's AI notetaker captured between October 2024 and November 2025, advisors spoke more than their clients did in 84% of cases. It is the kind of number, drawn from Jump's 2026 Financial Advisor Insights Report, that should embarrass a profession that ranks listening among its core skills.

Jump sells AI-driven tools for advisors, and its notetaker sat in on those conversations to see who held the floor. The measurement is new, though the behavior it captures is not, and the report supplies a benchmark—a number a practice can place next to its own meeting habits, and an uncomfortable one at that.

Financial Planning's coverage doesn't specify the margin, only the direction, and that direction is enough to sting: the meeting is the most expensive hour on a practice's calendar, and the client's voice is the part that gets rationed first. When the person whose job is to understand speaks more than the person who came to be understood, the agenda has already shifted.

Edward Mahaffy, who founded Little Rock, Arkansas-based ClientFirst Wealth, Legacy & Estate Planning in 2007, describes the quarterly meeting as a test of that discipline. Even with clients he has worked with for years, he has to remind himself that he is there to listen as much as explain. "They walk in for a quarterly meeting, and you've got the agenda that's just, you know, we're going to do tax planning this quarter, or we're going to do income planning," he told Financial Planning. "And the advisors have got in their mind a predetermined way that the meeting's going to roll. But the clients may need to talk. Sometimes meetings take longer than you thought they would, and they're very productive when you just hush."

Mahaffy's firm works almost exclusively with people nearing retirement, a client base whose questions carry high stakes and whose time to fix mistakes is finite. "Some of them want to hear all about the charts and graphs and stats," he said. "But most people just want to get back to the golf course or go play with their grandkids and hear that they're not going to run out of money or that everything's on track." The listening gap is visible in that split: the advisor prepares an explanation, the client wants reassurance, and neither happens until the client has said what being on track actually means.

Mike McMeans, president of Silverling Financial in Columbus, Ohio, builds the listening into the opening minute, starting every meeting by saying he has a few items to discuss and then asking: "I'd really like to hear why you think we're here today and what you want to make sure happens." The question hands the floor to the client before the advisor takes it, and it gives the client ownership of the meeting's purpose before the advisor's checklist gets a turn. When listening to the responses, McMeans will allow himself a question from time to time, but the first word belongs to the client.

The temptation to talk comes with the job; advisors are problem-solvers trained to get to the heart of a financial question as quickly as possible, and the faster the answer, the more valuable the hour feels. But the 84% figure suggests the hour is being spent on the advisor's demonstration of expertise rather than the client's expression of need—two different conversations, and the client usually knows which one they got.

The fix is meeting design. A practice doesn't need to change its advisors; it needs to change the order of the agenda, making McMeans's opening question or Mahaffy's instruction to hush a rule: the client speaks first, the advisor's agenda second. As this publication has argued, retirement income is the new advisory battleground, and the advisor who converts decumulation stress into a written plan will own the wealth transfer. That conversion begins in the meeting, with the client naming the fear out loud; the client has come for permission to spend, and the plan only works if the fear under it has been heard.

Listening is a retention tool, not a soft skill, and it is measurable. The advisor who asks the opening question and then counts to ten will find the meeting changes shape: the client says what they came to say, the advisor answers the real question, and the agenda gets covered on the way out. The 84% number is a benchmark to beat, and beating it starts with hushing.