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Notes -
I'm well aware the "A" in CFA doesn't stand for Advisor. Just as a CPA isn't required to be a tax accountant nor is a CFP required to be a financial planner, but I threw them in there for the microhumor on credential inflation. As I mentioned elsewhere, they're just the designations most stereotypically associated with each. If CFAs, CFPs, CPAs are the most common designations for financial advisors and planners, and we give CPAs to tax accountants and CFPs to financial planners, that only leaves CFAs for financial advisors.
Where, as I previously mentioned, self-identified financial advisors also often offer planning and self-identified financial planners also often financial advisory. In fact, the types of advice all five of those roles offer can often overlap.
As I already explained:
"While one can always find low-performing financial advisors, financial planners, tax accountants, tax attorneys, and estate lawyers out there, a lot of being a professional in higher-paying client-oriented work (such as the roles mentioned above) involves proactively thinking on behalf of your client(s), describing and outlining options and tradeoffs for your clients."
"Or at least, being able to convincingly portray you’re doing so even if you’re not, and telling them in the early stages 'talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it' does not quite lend such a portrayal. Especially when what they think they want may be against their best interests or straight-up unlawful to implement."
Especially for financial advisors and planners, the roles are much closer to being sales/relationship management (that is, managing a relationship with an account) than being say, a HFT quantitative researcher; @JarJarJedi's characterization that "all of those are pure technical roles" is completely baseless and inaccurate.
In countries including but not limited to the States, the Scotsman you're describing is a private wealth manager (or sometimes called a wealth manager), typically used for a financial advisor targeting high net worth clients. A private banker typically refers to someone who sells financial products to high net worth clients.
And indeed, whenever there's more than one client involved in a client account relationship, whether the relationship between the clients be spousal, parent-children, or both, there can be tradeoffs, differences of opinion, balancing of interests. As I explained for the case of a couple: "there can involve balancing the individual concerns of the two members of the couple and navigating the tradeoffs between the utility functions of one and the other. Aka, dealing with the relationship." Of course, one could take a No True Mediation line of argument, since the topics at hand may be different and level of intrusiveness might differ (or might not) than conversations with a therapist.
Under the traditional 1% of AUM model, it can be easily worth it for a financial advisors and planners to help "navigate the tradeoffs between the utility functions of one and the other," for clients well below "double figures" of what I presume to be millions USD. Even a couple with just $5 million USD is worth $50,000 of fees annually. These fees are the lifeblood of financial advisors and AUM-fee-based planners. They'll do what it takes within reason to keep a client account going and telling them "talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it" is risking the account going elsewhere. Hourly fee-based financial advisors and planners will be even happier to sit around and deal with any relationship-navigating.
Here's one amusing anecdote as to how determined financial advisors are for obtaining and maintaining client accounts:
Quite a few years ago I temporarily had a brokerage account at say Bank XYZ, with only a few hundred thousand USD worth of stuff I was transferring around to chase transfer bonuses. I've long since transferred this account out and closed it. The financial advisory side of Bank XYZ, starting from the time I opened that brokerage account, has been regularly calling me to try to sell me on their financial advisory services (and still try to this day). Each time they call (once every few weeks to a few months) they leave a voicemail and say something like "I just wanted to check-in since I see you haven't reached back out to [last person who called me] yet..." So there's a long unbroken chain of follow-up voicemails—and in Ship of Theseus style—where the more recent callers almost certainly haven't overlapped with the first few callers in their tenures at Bank XYZ's financial advisory.
Other banks have also attempted something similar but not as persistently/thirstily.
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