A new report from software firm Oracle reveals that consumers trust machines more than human advisers.

The majority of the 9,000 consumers surveyed globally said that they trust robots more than humans to help manage their personal finances.

Three quarters of consumers use robo-advice to help manage their finances – to free up time, reduce unnecessary spending and increase on-time payments. Robots are also helping many invest in the stock market.

Eighty-two per cent of respondents predicted that robots will replace financial advisers by 2026.

Garry Green, managing director at Quanton, believes that change is on the horizon but this may not be a bad thing for advisers.

“It’s not a case of getting rid of advisers and replacing them with robots, it is more that the market can grow and more people can be given advice and make better financial decisions because you are augmenting the advice process.”

Green says “More and more brokers are already using algorithms to help them in analysis, so it is becoming more mainstream and acceptable.”

As well as beginning to enter the mainstream, robo-advice also has the opportunity to “democratise financial advice”.

“In the past financial advice was only in the realms of the wealthy. But by using robo-advice and supplementary artificial intelligence it has actually opened up advice to more people. The market isn’t getting smaller it is actually getting bigger.

“The only constraint on growth is advisers. To give more people advice you need to make advisers more productive by allowing them to use robo-advice, then the [robo-adviser] can deal with a lot of the more mundane run of the mill advice. The more challenging advice can still be handled by the human adviser.”

For advisers to make the most of the incoming technology, Green says that they need to be thinking about the bigger picture.

“If advisers want to transition to servicing more clients going forward, they are going to want to look at ways in which they can bring robo-advice into their business. It gives advisers the opportunity to expand their businesses and to be more productive.”