Adviser shortage:
the generation of 2040 is already born

TL;DR

• 29.7% fewer passed Wft exams. Between 2019/20 and 2024/25, the number fell from roughly 17,800 to 12,500. That is my calculation from six CDFD annual reports.
• Eight of nine modules. They now score lower than five years ago. A newcomer passes around half the time; an existing adviser renewing a qualification passes around 80% of the time.
• Four years older in six years. The average age of a PE exam candidate rose by four years. More than half of people gaining a PE certificate are older than 50.
• The 2040 generation is already born. The cohorts that will supply successors are 13.5% smaller than the last large cohorts around 2000.
• 31,000 advisers reach retirement age. By 2040, the profession contracts in every scenario, to roughly 67,700 to 80,700 advisers.
• Recruitment will not solve this. The lever that remains is the customer value each qualified adviser can deliver, and that is where the AI assignment lies.

Six separate reports, one trend line

I put six years of CDFD exam data side by side. Not the pass rates every trade publication repeats, but the number below them: how many initial Wft exams are actually passed. It is 29.7% lower than five years ago.

This is not a one-year fluctuation. The gateway into the profession is narrowing, faster than I expected.

CDFD publishes quarterly statistics on pass rates by module, exam volumes and advisory qualifications. But it publishes by PE year. To see a multi-year trend, you have to line up six separate reports and do the maths yourself. I could not find that sum anywhere, so I made it.

Two things fell at once. The number of exams taken declined 17%, while the pass rate dropped 9.1 percentage points. Multiply the two and you are left with 29.7% fewer passed exams.

Eight of the nine modules now perform worse than five years ago. This is not one area of the profession having a difficult year. It is the entire intake.

Half of candidates do not pass

Someone taking an initial exam has about a 50% chance of passing. Someone taking a PE exam to renew an existing qualification is around 80%. That gap has been there for six years and was almost thirty percentage points last year.

Part of it is logical. A PE exam tests someone who does the work every day and keeps their knowledge current. An initial exam tests someone learning all the material for the first time. Still, the initial rate is strikingly low and falling fast. About half of the people who put in the work to sit the exam do not make it. In 2024-2025, pass rates were 36.6% for mortgage credit and 39.3% for wealth.

These are people who wanted to enter the profession and registered for an exam. They dropped out at the test, not at the point of choosing the career.

Four years older in six years

The sharpest figure in this analysis comes from CDFD itself. It compared candidates' ages between the 2017-2019 and 2022-2025 PE periods for the first time. The average age of someone taking a PE exam rose four years in six years.

The average PE candidate is now close to 50. The average person passing PE pension advice is 51, up from 47 in the previous period. For comparison, the average Dutch resident aged two months between 2018 and 2024, from 42.4 to 42.6 years. The average working Dutch person aged seven years between 1990 and 2023, over thirty-three years.

Four years in six, versus a little over one year in six. That is about three times as fast. A profession ageing at that rate receives very few young people. The group is moving forward with itself.

It would be easy to say financial services as a whole are ageing. That is not true, and it matters. AMweb reported that 21% of the roughly 265,000 people working in Dutch financial services are 55 or older, below the national average of 23.4%. The sector is younger than the Dutch labour market.

Zoom in on advisory work and the picture flips. Training provider Lindenhaeghe found that more than half of people obtaining a three-year PE certificate are older than 50, about a third are older than 55 and likely to leave in the coming years, while only 12% are younger than 35.

The sector is not ageing across the board. The qualified part of the work is attracting too few successors. That calls for something other than a broad recruitment campaign.

The 2040 sum can already be made

Everyone who will be 18 or older in 2040 was born no later than 2022. The 2040 workforce is not a forecast. It is a sum you can calculate today.

I used the CBS birth series from 1900 to today. The 2003 cohort was the last to reach 200,000 births, exactly 200,000 children. The 2023 cohort counted 164,000, the smallest since 1970. Since 2013, eleven of thirteen years have remained below 175,000 births.

In 2040, people aged 35 to 50, experienced enough for complex advice, will come from the 1990 to 2005 cohorts: an average of 197,000 births a year. Their successors, aged 18 to 34 in 2040, will come from the 2006 to 2022 cohorts: an average of 175,900 births a year.

That group is more than 10% smaller. Compare the last large cohorts with today's and the difference is 13.5%. That percentage is fixed. You can make policy, run campaigns or create internships, but you cannot change it. Those children were not born.

On top of that comes the second decline: a shrinking share of this smaller cohort is passing the exam.

What this does to adviser numbers

There is a trap here that I nearly fell into. Those 12,500 passed exams do not mean 12,500 new advisers. A professional qualification requires one to three modules. A mortgage adviser takes Basic, Wealth and Mortgage Credit. Some initial exams are also taken by established advisers adding a qualification.

Wft Basic is therefore the best proxy for new people, since almost everyone starts there. Around 5,600 people passed it in 2024-2025, down from 7,300 five years earlier, a fall of 24%. Divide 12,500 passed exams by those 5,600 entrants and you get 2.2 exams per person, exactly what the system requires.

That allowed me to build a cohort model. On March 31, 2025, CDFD counted 83,922 advisers with at least one professional qualification. I age the group by one year, remove people reaching retirement age or leaving earlier, and add new entrants. New advisers enter the model at 34 because CDFD starting ages are between 32 and 38.

Around 31,000 advisers, more than a third of the group, reach retirement age by 2040. The peak comes before 2036. Until then, about 2,200 leave each year through retirement alone. Including people leaving earlier, more than 4,500 people currently leave the profession each year.

Against that sits an intake starting at around 4,200 people a year and declining. In the optimistic scenario, the exam decline stops today and only demographic contraction remains. In the middle scenario, the decline fades gradually. In the pessimistic scenario, it continues for another decade.

The shortage does not start in 2040. It starts now, because intake is already below outflow in all three scenarios. By 2040 the range runs from around 67,700 to 80,700 advisers, with the middle scenario at roughly 77,200. Only the optimistic scenario stabilises, and only after the retirement wave around 2036 has passed.

In 2030, the scenarios differ by less than 2,500 advisers. In 2040, by more than 13,000. That makes the problem easy to miss in the first years and therefore easy to ignore.

What I will not claim

Starting mortgage advisers are getting younger. Their average starting age fell from 36 to 32, the biggest decline of any module. Young people are entering, just not in enough numbers and not everywhere.

The problem is also about outflow. At ASR, turnover among people under 30 was 14.8% in 2023, compared with 8.1% among older employees. People who enter leave faster. Looking only at the exam gateway misses half the leak.

The projection model relies on two assumptions I cannot prove: that three quarters of people passing Basic become advisers, and that 2.5% leave the profession each year before retirement. Adjust those and the level moves. The direction does not. As long as fewer people enter than leave, the profession shrinks. The retirement outflow is firmer because it follows the age structure of people already in the profession.

The trend line is my calculation, not CDFD's. CDFD publishes individual years; I drew the line across them. These caveats do not make the picture happier, but they make it more precise.

Fewer hands, more capacity

I used to see numbers like these as a recruitment problem. I no longer do. Recruitment redistributes scarcity; it does not make the group larger. If you lure an adviser from the office down the road, nothing is solved nationally. When scarcity is already embedded in the birth data, competing for the same people mostly adds cost.

The lever that remains is how much customer value one qualified adviser can deliver. AI can make a difference there, not by replacing the adviser, but by removing work around the adviser: preparing files, comparing policies, reading conditions, drafting an advice report that the adviser still checks and signs, and signalling life events that warrant a conversation.

The AFM calls it a diploma requirement. Anyone advising clients needs a valid qualification for the products on which they advise and must keep it valid through PE exams. Without a valid professional qualification, a person may not advise. That requirement belongs to a human, not a system. As I wrote earlier in your licence is your right to exist, the licence itself becomes the scarce asset as AI makes advisory work cheaper.

But there is a catch. If AI takes over junior work, where does the junior learn the craft? Preparing files and shadowing a senior are not just production activities, they are the training route. Take them away and you may get a generation that passes the exam but never develops professional judgement. I wrote about that risk as never-skilling, and in a sector short of successors it is twice as dangerous.

What I would do

Do not start with tooling. Start with the count.

1. Count your own outflow. How many of your advisers are older than 55?
2. Translate it into capacity. How many advisory hours will you lose between now and 2035?
3. Put realistic intake alongside it. Account for smaller cohorts and a narrower exam gateway.
4. Make the remaining gap your AI assignment. Not in vague ambitions, but in adviser hours recovered each week.
5. Design how juniors will still learn the work. Especially because AI can remove their practice material.

The 2003 cohort counted 200,000 children. The 2023 cohort counted 164,000. Those 36,000 will not be added later.

Everyone working in your office in 2040 is already walking around somewhere today.

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Sources

* Wft exam quarterly and annual statistics used to compile the 2019-2025 series: cdfd.nl (opens in new window) * Age structure of Dutch financial services in the first quarter of 2026: amweb.nl (opens in new window) * CDFD comparison of candidate ages across PE periods and industry responses: amweb.nl (opens in new window) * Diploma and PE requirements for advising employees: afm.nl (opens in new window) * Live births by year from 1900 onwards: cbs.nl (opens in new window)