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Well, good afternoon lovely peeps. Hope it’s been a cracking week for you all.

I feel like I’m still playing catch up from half term (massive thanks to Alanis for last week’s Eclipse musings) and part of my week was spent in London chatting, amongst other things, on a panel for the launch of BNY’s Life After Work paper (a snazzy new phrase to replace “retirement” and all the negative connotations that go with that).

The paper looks at life after work from a range of angles and of course covers the impacts of inflation on consumers and of regulation on advisers. I was asked to share what we, at Verve, see as being a pressure on advisers who are providing retirement planning and my answer was that the main issue isn’t a single pressure, but the endless interaction between numerous pressures and the challenge that causes firms to attempt to pick through things. For example, we have:

• The impact of inflation and interest rates makes annuities far more mathematically attractive (if not emotionally), but this is immediately being impacted by the service challenges as annuity providers were caught on the hop.
• The client’s retirement plans have been impacted by Covid. Many people “retired early” as the world was upside down, but have now chosen to go back. Some because of cost of living pressures. Some because of boredom. But all reversing, to an extent, the plan their adviser put in place.
• The impact of the employment market bouncing from one extreme to the other, and back again.
• The change in regulation, from Consumer Duty through to the retirement income review, means business plans and processes need constant reviewing.
• Even outside of all of these immediate factors, is the broader sociological piece. We are now getting to the end of the ‘Boomers’ retiring and moving into the ‘Gen X’ generation retiring and their retirement plans and expectations are very different; meaning the approach to retirement advice for the last 10 -15 years needs an overhaul anyway to reflect the generational shift.

Each of these is a challenge to be grappled with in the context of providing robust, future-proofed (if possible), compliant advice; when you have them all playing out at once, it can feel impossible to be able to pin something down, with each almost-solution just wriggling and slipping out of your grasp.

We also discussed the change in philosophy to retirement planning more broadly. Back in ye olden days when I started in finance, we would sometimes use the free Trustnet site to randomly choose funds and sometimes the adviser looked on the back pages of the FT at fund performance, went down the list and chose one he liked the look of (compliance people reading this, I’m sorry if I just ruined your whole weekend!). Things, of course, moved on and firms started creating actual portfolios, rebalancing etc (CIPs). The next stage was for Centralised Retirement Propositions which, initially, were just a decumulation version of an accumulation CIP.

However, we have been talking to our firms more recently about their CRP being a Centralised Retirement Philosophy and it had nothing whatsoever to do with fund selection and everything about recognising the extensive variety of approaches to retirement for clients, the myriad of potential solutions, which you are able to advise on and a centralised approach to it based on their circumstances. For example, your CRP could include your approach to:

• Pension plans (and your structure around drawdown vs annuity vs hybrid).
• Investment income (and priorities of how and when).
• Property portfolio incomes.
• Continuing to work part-time (the hard stop of retirement appeals less and less to many people).
• Equity release at an earlier stage, not just for long-term care.

While there are clearly a lot of challenges here, the unanimous verdict of the panel is that it does indeed provide a huge opportunity for everyone in the advice sector. The more complicated it becomes to deliver sound financial advice, the more important it is for individuals to seek professional support for their retirement planning.

I’ve linked the BNY report below along with a link to my next panel contribution which is Parmenion’s Let’s Grow event in a couple of weeks. And I occasionally like to go completely rogue with my links and throw in a most random one, and this is one of those times. While I don’t expect it to be the music of choice for 100% of Eclipse readers, the new Chase n Status album dropped today and my personal, in-depth review of it, is that it is an absolute belter.

Speaking of belters, I’ve got one for you in the form of a wine recommendation. A Moroccan grey wine. Yep. Moroccan. And grey. You heard me. It’s basically a super light rosé and not easily available, although I did find this one.

Have a wonderful weekend all,

Read about it: the next phase of ‘retirement’ and the opportunity facing the advice sector.

Come join in: as we talk about where advice goes next and ripping up the rule book (my favourite thing to do).

Turn it up: as loud as your ears can take it and be ready to rock!

Earlier this year we launched our brand-new business dashboard - Dextera™. It's already part of day-to-day life for over 300 financial advice firms, and you can try it for yourself here.