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I’ll be upfront: I’m not the one building cashflow models or picking apart suitability files. That’s the rest of the team. But after sharing Cecilia Furner’s piece on better retirement outcomes for women yesterday, I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole with the research, and one thing stood out almost immediately.

The gender pension gap is usually talked about as a retirement problem. Something that becomes obvious at 60, when somebody suddenly realises their pension looks very different from their partner’s. By that point, though, there’s often not a huge amount of time left to change the outcome, which makes the more useful question when the warning signs actually start appearing.

And I’ll admit, some of the ages in the research made this feel a bit more personal than I expected.

I’m 41, I have three children and I’ve got a career that I genuinely love and really value. But it has taken time to get here. Like a lot of families, there have been periods where decisions around work, children, childcare and what made sense financially had to be made as a household. My husband’s income has done more of the heavy lifting financially at different points, and that doesn’t mean my career has mattered any less to me. It just means our working lives haven’t followed exactly the same path.

That is probably why the research around when the pension gap starts to develop caught my attention.

AJ Bell’s research points to age 28 as one of the first places pension priorities begin to diverge. Before then, pensions barely register as a high financial priority for either men or women, with just 6% of women and 9% of men ranking them that way. It’s a small difference at that stage, but it’s interesting because it’s happening years before most people would consider themselves to be doing any serious retirement planning.

The bigger shift seems to come later. Professional Paraplanner reported on Aviva research covering more than five million pension plans, which found the gap widening from 21% in the late thirties to 32% by the early fifties. Aviva pointed to age 35 as a particularly important point, not because something suddenly happens on somebody’s 35th birthday, but because that tends to coincide with the years when career breaks, reduced hours and caring responsibilities become much more common.

That age really resonated with me. Your thirties can be such a busy period of life that I’m not sure many people are stopping to think about the impact a decision today might have on their pension 25 or 30 years later. You’re thinking about nursery bills, school runs, mortgages, whether somebody needs to finish early on a Wednesday and who has the job with a bit more flexibility. Pension compounding is probably not top of the WhatsApp conversation.

By age 60 to 65, women’s pension pots average around 57% of men’s. That’s a pretty big gap to discover when retirement is already on the doorstep.

Career breaks are a big part of the picture

This isn’t simply about women choosing to put less into a pension. A lot of the difference comes from what happens around work. Women are much more likely to take time away from employment for childcare, reduce their hours or step back from progression for a period, and those are exactly the years when missed contributions have the longest time to matter.

One estimate suggests a five-year career break beginning at 35 could reduce someone’s pension by around £69,000 by retirement. That was the part that really jumped out at me. Missing contributions then doesn’t just mean missing the money that would have gone in, it also means losing years of potential growth on those contributions.

I also think the language around this matters. “Career break” can make it sound as though somebody simply decided to put their career on hold. Real life is usually much messier than that. It might be maternity leave followed by reduced hours because childcare costs are enormous. It might be choosing the job that works around school rather than the one that offers the next promotion. It might simply make more financial sense for one person’s career to take priority for a few years.

None of those things necessarily feels like a big pension decision at the time. Usually, they just feel like normal family decisions.

And I think that’s part of the problem. The pension impact is happening quietly in the background.

Some of the things that can help are surprisingly simple

Reading through the research, I kept thinking that some of this is information people could really do with much earlier. A non-earning partner can still have up to £3,600 gross paid into a pension each tax year, including basic-rate tax relief. Child Benefit can also protect National Insurance records and therefore State Pension entitlement, provided the claim is made correctly.

There are other small things worth checking too, like what actually happens to workplace pension contributions during parental leave rather than simply assuming they stop. None of these things fixes the gender pension gap on its own, but over 20 or 30 years, small decisions can make a meaningful difference.

And I wonder how many women would make different decisions if somebody simply pointed these things out at the right time.

I certainly don’t remember sitting in my twenties thinking about whether the choices I would make around work and family in my thirties might eventually affect my retirement income. I was thinking about building a career and paying the bills in front of me. I suspect I’m not particularly unusual in that.

Where this becomes an advice issue

This is probably the bit that interests me most from a We Complement point of view. The gender pension gap isn’t really a separate issue that suddenly needs discussing with women at retirement. It’s something that can show up much earlier in ordinary retirement planning.

If somebody has had a career break, moved to part-time hours or spent several years making lower contributions, has that actually been reflected in the cashflow modelling? If one partner’s pension is significantly smaller than the other’s, does the plan recognise why? And if a couple are being advised together, is it still clear what each of them owns and what their individual retirement position looks like?

That last point feels particularly important to me.

As somebody who is married, I naturally think about our finances as ours. We’re a household and we make decisions as a household. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are also two individuals, with two careers, two pension histories and potentially two very different retirement positions.

Looking at household pension wealth as one big number can make a plan look perfectly comfortable while hiding a very different picture for the two people sitting in the room. That might never become an issue, but divorce, bereavement or simply wanting to understand your own financial position can suddenly make the distinction quite important.

And I don’t think recognising that somehow undermines joint financial planning. If anything, it makes it better.

The file should tell the story too

This is where the paraplanning and suitability side comes in. A good retirement recommendation shouldn’t just show where the client is now. The reasoning behind it should also make sense in the context of how they got there.

Career breaks, reduced earnings, gaps in contributions, changes in working patterns and different levels of pension provision between partners are all part of the client’s financial history. If they’re relevant to the recommendation, they should be visible in the thinking behind the advice rather than simply sitting quietly in the fact find.

We see plenty of cases where two clients look quite similar at first glance. Same age, similar retirement date, similar objectives. But once you understand the years that came before, the planning needs can look very different.

And perhaps that is where advisers can make the biggest difference. Not by telling somebody at 60 that there’s a gender pension gap, but by noticing the things that could create one while there is still time to influence the outcome.

Maybe 35 is the age worth remembering

I don’t think advisers need to suddenly start having a separate “gender pension gap conversation” with every female client. But I do think there’s something useful in the ages the research keeps pointing towards.

If the gap is beginning to emerge in someone’s late twenties and then widening more noticeably through their thirties and forties, those are the years when there is still plenty of time to do something about it. Waiting until 60 to spot it feels a little late.

And perhaps this is the bit I see differently now that I’m 41.

At 28, retirement felt miles away. At 35, life was busy. Now, at 41, my eldest has finished school and I can look back and see how lots of perfectly ordinary decisions made over those years could shape what someone’s finances eventually look like.

So perhaps the useful question at review isn’t simply “How much is in the pension?”

pension?”

It’s “What has happened since we last looked at the plan, and has that changed where this client is heading?”

Because the gender pension gap may become most visible at retirement, but the decisions that help create it are often made decades earlier, usually while people are thinking about everything except their pension.

And that, for me, was the biggest thing I took from the research.

We’ve reviewed plenty of suitability files over the years that say some version of the same thing: the pension sits outside the estate, so it is the last pot to draw from in retirement and the first one left alone.

That way of thinking became especially embedded after the pension changes introduced from 2015, when pensions became much more attractive from an estate-planning point of view. So although the 2027 changes are significant, this is not entirely new territory. In some ways, pensions are being pulled back into an IHT conversation they have increasingly sat outside of for the last decade.

From 6 April 2027, most unused pension funds and pension death benefits will be brought into the value of a deceased person’s estate for inheritance tax purposes. Personal representatives will be responsible for reporting and paying any IHT due, while pension scheme administrators will also have new information-sharing and payment responsibilities. The main reform is now legislated for, although HMRC is still publishing the practical detail and guidance ahead of implementation.

That is the headline everyone knows. The bit I think is more interesting is what happens next.

The part nobody really signs up for

At the moment, pension death benefits often sit outside probate and personal representatives may have very little to do with them. From April 2027, that changes quite significantly. The person administering the estate may need to contact pension schemes, establish what pension benefits exist, obtain values, work out whether any of those benefits are exempt, complete the IHT account where one is needed, and make sure the right amount of tax is paid.

That person is quite often a spouse, an adult child or a friend who agreed to be executor years ago and probably did not imagine they would one day be dealing with HMRC and several pension providers at the same time. HMRC’s latest technical note gives more detail on how that process is expected to work. Pension scheme administrators will generally have 28 days to provide core information once they receive a valid request, with separate timings applying where beneficiaries have not yet been decided.

There is also a new withholding mechanism. If the personal representative reasonably believes IHT may be due, they can ask the scheme to withhold up to 50% of the relevant pension death benefit for up to 15 months after the end of the month in which the member died. Where a valid Pensions Direct Payment Scheme notice is served, the scheme administrator has 35 days to make the payment to HMRC.

None of that is impossible, but it is not exactly intuitive either, especially if you have never administered an estate before.

The tax is one thing. The admin is another.

I think that is the bit advisers need to get ahead of. The tax position is relatively easy to explain. The process is messier. A client may have several pension schemes, old workplace arrangements, a SIPP, expression of wish forms that have not been looked at for years, and beneficiaries spread across different parts of the family. Their executor may not even know all of those pensions exist.

That is why this feels like a review conversation rather than something to leave until 2027. Who is nominated to receive the pension? Does that still make sense? Does the executor know where the pensions are held? Does the wider retirement plan still assume the pension will be left untouched because it sits outside the estate?

Those are fairly simple questions to ask now. They may be much harder questions for somebody else to answer later.

There is also an important interaction with income tax. The rules are being designed so that, where IHT has been paid on pension benefits, the same slice of benefit should not effectively suffer tax twice. HMRC’s technical notes set out how IHT and income tax are intended to interact and how beneficiaries may be able to recover income tax where appropriate.

That is sensible in principle. In practice, it may still become quite complicated where benefits are split between several beneficiaries, paid in different forms or taken over more than one tax year. Again, not something most personal representatives are going to be familiar with.

This is happening

There was a lot of pushback when the change was first proposed, but the main reform is now in legislation and the new regime applies to deaths on or after 6 April 2027. HMRC is still publishing secondary legislation, guidance and practical materials, so some of the process detail will continue to develop between now and then.

For planning purposes, though, April 2027 is not something I would treat as speculative anymore. It is coming.

Why I think this belongs at the next review

There are advisers who are already very much on top of this. We are seeing firms actively reviewing pension nominations, retirement income strategies and wider IHT planning with clients now, rather than waiting for April 2027.

But we are also still hearing versions of “we’ll deal with that next year”, and that is the bit I would be wary of.

There is no need to turn every annual review into a full IHT exercise, or start changing perfectly sensible plans simply because the rules are moving. But expression of wish forms written years ago may need another look. Retirement strategies built around leaving the pension untouched until last may need reconsidering. Clients may also want to think about whether the person administering their estate actually knows what pension arrangements exist and where they are held.

None of that needs to wait until 2027. It is really about checking whether the assumptions sitting behind the plan today will still make sense under the rules the client is heading towards.

For me, the most useful thing an adviser can do now is make sure the conversation has happened and the file shows the client understood what is changing. Because the tax calculation is not the bit I would worry about most. It is a grieving spouse or adult child finding a pension scheme they did not know existed, with a deadline already running, trying to work out what HMRC needs from them.

That is the bit worth getting ahead of.

Where this leaves advisers

The point is not to turn every annual review into an IHT exercise. It is simply to make sure the assumptions sitting behind the retirement plan and the suitability file still make sense under the rules clients will actually face.

If this is something you are starting to think through with clients, we are always happy to be a second pair of eyes. You can read a little more about our tax-efficient investment support and wider suitability consulting support if useful, or just get in touch if you want to talk a case through.

I’m not a paraplanner. I don’t write suitability reports, and I wouldn’t pretend to know what should go in every section of one. But I talk to a lot of people who do, and there’s a slightly awkward question that comes up more often than you might think.

A suitability report is usually read properly by the paraplanner who wrote it, the adviser who checks it and, depending on the firm, compliance too. What is much harder to know is how much of it the client actually reads. From the conversations we have with firms, there’s often a suspicion that clients focus on the summary, the recommendation and the cost, rather than reading every page from beginning to end.

That isn’t a criticism of clients. Most people do not want to spend their evening reading page after page about their own circumstances in language they do not use every day. What they really want to understand is fairly simple: did you understand my situation, what are you recommending, why, what is it going to cost me, and do I trust the advice?

So who is the report actually for?

The truth is, it is doing two jobs at once. It has to help the client understand the recommendation in front of them, and it also has to create a clear record of why that recommendation was suitable.

Both matter. The problem starts when the second job begins to overwhelm the first.

We see this most clearly when we start working with firms that have been using the same report template for years. A paragraph gets added after one case. Another gets added later because something once felt like it should have been covered. Then a disclosure appears because someone worries it might be needed one day. None of that is bad practice. Usually, it comes from a perfectly reasonable desire to make sure nothing gets missed. But over time, the report grows, and it’s often not until a new firm sits down with us and sees their own template laid out fresh that they notice quite how much it’s grown. More than one has told us that they’d rather start again with ours than keep adding to their own.

How reports gradually get longer

At some point, it becomes worth asking whether every section is still helping this particular client understand this particular recommendation. That is often part of the early work we do with firms through our suitability consulting support, not cutting things just for the sake of making a report shorter, but asking what each section is there to do and whether it still earns its place.

Because client understanding is not the same thing as information volume.

That is close to what the FCA’s Consumer Duty guidance on consumer understanding is getting at too. The aim is not simply to disclose information, but to communicate it in a way the customer can understand, at the right time, so they can make an informed decision.

Client understanding vs evidence

Some cases absolutely need detail. Some clients want more explanation than others. There will always be parts of the file that exist because the advice needs to be properly evidenced.

But pretending every paragraph is there for exactly the same reader, doing exactly the same job, probably does not help anyone.

A good suitability report should be able to do both: explain the advice clearly to the client and evidence the reasoning properly for the file. The challenge is making sure one does not drown out the other.

If a client read the whole thing, would they understand it, or would they just feel like they’d been told something very thoroughly?

Sound familiar? Whether it’s a template that’s grown well beyond what any client actually needs, or a nagging feeling that nobody’s quite sure who the report is written for anymore, it might be worth a second look. We’re always happy to talk it through, no obligation, just a conversation about what’s actually needed and what isn’t.

On 13 July 2026, the DWP and the FCA published an updated consultation on a Value for Money framework for workplace pension schemes, focused initially on default and quasi-default defined contribution arrangements. It’s built around comparing schemes on cost, investment performance and service quality together, rather than cost alone. The consultation closes on 1 September 2026, with the FCA expecting the first larger schemes to complete assessments from 2028, and broader rollout from 2029.

My first reaction was that this felt like a workplace pensions story, not an advice story. It largely still is. The framework is aimed at scheme operators, trustees, independent governance committees and employers, not at individual advice recommendations. But the more conversations I’ve had about it, the more I think the information it eventually produces is worth advisers keeping an eye on.

CP26/25: The Value for Money Framework: consultation

Why this might still matter to advisers

Cost has always been a relatively easy thing to justify in a suitability report. It’s a number. Either the charges are competitive or they’re not, and that’s simple to evidence. Value is a different kind of judgement, made up of things that are harder to reduce to a single figure: how a scheme’s investments have actually performed, how responsive the provider is, whether members get the support they need when something goes wrong.

The framework is not an adviser suitability rule, and it does not automatically mean a scheme with a weaker rating is unsuitable for an individual client. But once more comparable value information exists across workplace schemes, it may become another piece of evidence firms need to consider and interpret, particularly where a workplace or legacy arrangement forms part of a wider recommendation.

That’s the interesting part, for me. Not a new rule, but a new source of evidence that didn’t really exist in this form before.

What’s worth doing now

• Start noting the reasoning behind scheme and provider recommendations in more than cost terms, even informally, so there’s a trail to point back to later.
• If your firm runs a centralised retirement or investment proposition, take a proper look at how each element would hold up against cost, performance and service, not cost alone.
• Keep half an eye on how the framework’s ratings actually get published as it rolls out from 2028 onward. A scheme that looks fine today could be rated differently once the comparisons exist.
• Consider how your research and review processes would use future published value assessments where a client’s workplace or legacy arrangement is relevant to the advice.

None of this is about second-guessing recommendations that have already been made, or assuming every legacy scheme needs revisiting because of this consultation. It’s about building the habit of capturing why a scheme was considered good value at the time, so that reasoning is there if it’s ever needed.

The framework is primarily a workplace pensions reform, still some years from full rollout. But the information it creates could eventually influence research, review processes and the way firms evidence decisions involving existing workplace arrangements, even without becoming a suitability rule in its own right.

As these value ratings start to appear over the next few years, what would you want to see change first in how your firm researches workplace schemes?

If you’d like to learn more about how we support financial planning firms with suitability consulting, annual reviews and operational support, you’ll find more information here:

Services

A while back, I wrote about how every firm we work with seems to run its annual review process slightly differently. The same consultation proposing changes to what counts as sufficient information (see last week’s issue) is also proposing that firms should instead offer periodic reviews at a frequency reflecting the client’s needs, rather than a fixed annual one.

On paper, that sounds like flexibility. In practice, it’s a new decision a firm now has to make, and be able to explain.

Why “periodic” is harder than “annual”

An annual review has one big advantage: nobody has to think about it very hard. The date comes round, the review happens. It isn’t necessarily the right cadence for every client, but it’s simple, and it’s consistent.

Periodic reviews remove that simplicity. If the frequency is meant to reflect the client’s actual circumstances, someone has to decide what those circumstances call for, and then be able to explain why. A client in drawdown, relying on the portfolio for income, probably needs checking in on more often than someone twenty years from retirement with a straightforward pension. That much is obvious. What’s less obvious is how a firm decides, consistently, where every other client sits in between.

And once that decision exists, it needs the same discipline the annual review used to get automatically. If a client goes eighteen months between reviews instead of twelve, was that decided deliberately, based on their situation, or did it just happen because nobody flagged it?

What’s worth thinking about now

• Look at how review frequency actually gets decided today. Is it genuinely need-based already, or has “annual” been doing the thinking for you?
• Build some simple criteria for what pushes a client toward more frequent reviews. Drawdown, vulnerability, recent life changes and volatile portfolios are the obvious starting points.
• Document the reasoning per client, not just the date. “Reviewed every 12 months” and “reviewed every 12 months because of X” are very different things to show a regulator, or a new adviser picking up the file.
• Think about capacity. If review frequency becomes genuinely variable across the client bank, the servicing model behind it needs to flex with it too, not just the calendar.
• Check that the service agreement, client communications and charging structure still accurately describe what the client will receive.

That last point is one we spend a lot of time on with firms, if I’m honest. It’s rarely the review itself that’s the hard part. It’s building a servicing model, and a fee structure, flexible enough to support reviews that don’t all happen on the same twelve-month clock, without the whole operation losing its shape.

The FCA moving away from a fixed annual requirement doesn’t remove the need for a review process. It just moves the hard part earlier, from running the review to deciding when one’s actually needed. Firms who’ve never had to make that call before are about to need a reason for one.

What’s your process today for deciding when a client is due a review, and where would that reasoning live if someone asked to see it?

If you’d like to learn more about how we support financial planning firms with suitability consulting, annual reviews and operational support, you’ll find more information here:

Suitability Report Writing Services for Financial Advisers

A paraplanner I work with sent me a message a few weeks ago that just said, “have you seen CP26/10 yet?” I hadn’t, not properly. I’d seen it mentioned in passing and filed it under things @Paul and the team would probably be all over. By the end of that conversation, I understood why she’d flagged it.

CP26/10: Simplifying the pensions and investment advice rules

The FCA is proposing to change part of the wording underpinning suitability assessments. Right now, firms have to gather the information “necessary” to assess suitability. Under the new proposal, that becomes information that’s “sufficient” to reasonably demonstrate a recommendation is suitable.

Two words. Both sound perfectly reasonable on their own.

But swap one for the other and the question the file has to answer shifts. “Necessary” can easily be interpreted defensively, with firms gathering everything they might conceivably need. “Sufficient” appears to give more room for proportionality, but it also introduces a judgement firms will need to apply consistently: have we gathered enough, for this client, in this situation, to justify the recommendation we’ve made? That’s a harder question, and a much more interesting one.

Why this isn’t really a compliance question

I know you’ve heard me say this a few times before: I’m not a paraplanner, and I wouldn’t try to explain COBS 9 to anyone who actually writes suitability reports for a living. But I speak to a lot of people who do, along with advisers, business owners and heads of paraplanning, most days of the week, and the same concern keeps surfacing in slightly different words.

If “sufficient” becomes the standard, who decides what’s sufficient for a particular client? Is it the adviser, using years of experience to judge in the moment? Is it a template, built once and used for everyone regardless of the case in front of them? Is it whoever happens to be writing the report that day, using their own sense of what good enough looks like?

Because if the answer is all three, depending on who’s involved, a firm doesn’t really have one suitability standard. It has as many standards as it has people writing reports.

What we’d suggest doing now

The Policy Statement isn’t expected until Q4, so there’s no need to panic. But a few of the firms we work with have already started having this conversation internally, and a handful of things have come up as genuinely useful starting points:

• Read the actual wording on “sufficient” in the consultation paper itself, not just a summary of it. It’s short, and worth reading in full rather than relying on someone else’s interpretation.
• Pull a handful of recent files and ask honestly: would we be comfortable calling this file “sufficient” if we had to justify it, rather than “necessary” because we ticked the boxes on a template?
• Decide, as a team, who owns that judgement call, not file by file, but as a process for setting the standard everyone works to.

• Build in time to revisit this once the Policy Statement is actually published. Near-final proposals have a habit of shifting slightly at the last hurdle, and this one touches the language behind almost every recommendation a firm makes.

None of that needs to happen overnight. But a file standard that’s decided by habit rather than by design is exactly the kind of thing that gets harder to unpick the longer it’s left.

Where we fit into that conversation

This is genuinely the kind of conversation we end up having with firms anyway, usually not because anyone’s asked us to interpret the rules, but because we’re looking at the same files week in, week out, across different advisers and different cases. Consistency is often easier to spot from the outside than from inside a single desk.

We’d love to hear how you think “sufficient” will play out in practice for your files, and whether your firm has already started defining what that looks like.

If you’d like to learn more about how we support financial planning firms with suitability consulting, annual reviews and operational support, you’ll find more information here:

Suitability Report Writing Services for Financial Advisers

Since targeted support was confirmed, most of the discussion has focused on what it is and who can offer it. The conversations we’ve been having have been slightly different. They’re about what happens when a firm starts delivering targeted support alongside full regulated advice.

Two kinds of recommendation, one client bank

Targeted support isn’t full advice. It doesn’t need the same personal recommendation, and it doesn’t need a suitability report in the way COBS 9.4 requires for regulated advice. That’s rather the point of it, since it’s meant to be lighter touch, quicker to deliver, and available to people who wouldn’t otherwise get anything at all.

But most firms offering it won’t be running two separate businesses side by side. They’ll be running one client bank, where some clients get targeted support, some get full advice, and some get both at different points as their circumstances change.

That’s where it gets interesting from a file perspective, because the client doesn’t experience these as two different regulatory categories with two different standards behind them. As far as they’re concerned, their adviser told them to do something.

Where this could go wrong

The most likely failure probably isn’t a firm getting targeted support badly wrong for one particular client. It’s more likely to be a firm building it as a genuinely separate process, run by a different part of the business, with its own assumptions, its own records and its own owner, sitting alongside full advice rather than connected to it.

Six months in, nobody would necessarily notice. A year in, a file review or a client complaint might be what surfaces a case where the segment-level assumption and the client’s actual circumstances had drifted apart somewhere along the way.

That’s not really a targeted support problem specifically. It’s the same lesson firms have already learned from running annual reviews, onboarding and servicing slightly differently across a growing business. Consistency has to be designed in. It rarely happens by accident.

The consistency question

If targeted support is built around “people like you” assumptions, and full advice is built around one client’s actual circumstances, a firm needs to be confident the two aren’t pulling in different directions without anyone noticing. A few questions we’ve found useful when working through this with firms:

Would this client have received the same underlying message through full advice?

If targeted support nudges someone toward moving cash into investments, and a full suitability process for a similar client would have paused on capacity for loss, that’s worth catching before it becomes a pattern across the client bank, not afterwards.

Who is checking the assumptions behind the segment, rather than just the individual outcome?

Full advice gets checked file by file. Targeted support, by design, gets checked at the level of the segment and the assumptions sitting behind it, and that calls for a different kind of oversight rather than a lighter version of the one already in place.

What happens at the handover point?

If a client moves from targeted support into full advice, or the other way round, is there a clear record of what they were told, when, and on what basis? That record matters just as much as the suitability report itself.

What firms may want to evidence

For firms offering targeted support, or building toward it, a lot of the groundwork looks less like new advice process and more like new governance sitting behind it. That might include evidencing:

•     How a client is identified as belonging to a given segment, and on what data.

•     What assumptions sit behind the segment, and who signed them off.

•     How often those assumptions get reviewed, given they’re being applied to many clients rather than tested against one.

•     What a client is actually told, and how that record is kept, given there’s no suitability report to fall back on.

•     How a firm would spot targeted support and full advice pulling clients in different directions.

•     What happens if a client acts on targeted support and it turns out to be the wrong call for their specific circumstances.

•     Who owns the decision to move a client from targeted support into full advice, and when that trigger should be pulled.

None of that is about slowing targeted support down. It’s about giving the lighter-touch process the same discipline firms have spent years building into suitability files, just applied in a different way.

The question I keep coming back to

Targeted support is meant to help more people get useful support, and that’s a genuinely good thing for an industry that has spent years talking about the advice gap. But good intentions and good file evidencing are two different things.

For me, the real work over the next year isn’t building the targeted support proposition itself. It’s the quieter work of making sure it doesn’t drift away from what full advice is telling other clients, and that somebody in the business actually owns keeping the two aligned.

Targeted support is designed to close the advice gap. The firms that deliver it successfully won’t just be the ones that build a proposition. They’ll be the ones that build the governance around it.

Has your firm started thinking through how targeted support will sit alongside full advice, and who owns making sure the two stay consistent?

Further Reading

If you missed the first two editions of Behind Better Advice, you can read them here.

If you’d like to learn more about how we support financial planning firms with suitability consulting, annual reviews and operational support, you’ll find more information here.

When an advice firm starts to feel stretched, the obvious answer is often:

“We need another paraplanner.”

And sometimes, that’s exactly the right decision.

But before you start writing the job description, I think there’s one question worth asking…

What problem are we actually trying to solve?

Because needing more support doesn’t always mean needing another permanent employee.

Recruitment is a big investment. Not just financially, but in the time it takes to advertise, interview, wait out a notice period, onboard someone and help them get up to speed.

We know that first-hand. We’ve been recruiting ourselves recently, and finding experienced paraplanners isn’t always quick or straightforward. Even when you find the right person, there’s still a notice period to work through and time spent helping them settle into the business.

That’s not a reason not to recruit.

It’s simply a reminder that recruitment solves one problem, but it isn’t the answer to every problem.

Is it really a capacity issue?

Perhaps the business has grown and there genuinely aren’t enough hours in the day.

If that’s the case, recruiting may well be the right decision.

But sometimes the pressure is temporary.

It might be tax year end.

It might be a maternity leave.

It might be someone handing in their notice.

It might be an unexpected increase in new business.

Or it might simply be that the team needs a bit of breathing space while recruitment is underway.

They’re all slightly different situations, and they don’t necessarily need the same solution.

Or is something else causing the pressure?

Sometimes a team feels overloaded because the workload has increased.

Sometimes it’s because the process around the work has become inefficient.

Cases bounce backwards and forwards because something is missing.

Reports sit waiting for approval.

Advisers spend time chasing updates.

Paraplanners end up doing work that could sit elsewhere in the process.

Adding another person might ease the pressure.

But it might not solve what’s creating it.

Do you need another person, or different capability?

One of the things I’ve noticed over the past couple of years is that the support advice firms need has become much broader.

It isn’t always about writing another suitability report.

Sometimes it’s an experienced technical sounding board.

Sometimes it’s implementation support.

Sometimes it’s help with annual reviews.

Sometimes it’s improving workflows.

Sometimes it’s simply having extra capacity available when things get busy.

They’re all different challenges, but it’s easy to bundle them together under one sentence:

“We need another paraplanner.”

It doesn’t have to be in-house or outsourced

I think this is where the conversation is changing.

The firms we work with aren’t choosing between an in-house team and outsourced support.

Many have both.

They recruit because they want to invest in their business long term.

They bring in external support because they need flexibility, specialist experience or extra capacity while they continue to grow.

One doesn’t replace the other.

Often, they complement each other.

For me, that’s probably the biggest shift I’ve seen over the last few years.

Outsourcing isn’t just about filling a gap anymore.

It’s about giving firms access to capability exactly when they need it.

If your firm suddenly became 30% busier tomorrow, what would your first instinct be?

Would you recruit?

Would you improve your processes?

Or would you bring in some external support while you worked out the best long-term solution?

I’d be genuinely interested to hear how other firms approach it.

For firms weighing up their options, it can help to look at the wider picture rather than treating recruitment as the only answer. That might mean bringing in outsourced paraplanning support for extra capacity, reviewing where process improvements could remove pressure, or using external support for areas such as annual planning reviews while the in-house team focuses on the work that needs their attention most. The right solution will be different for every firm, but having more than one option usually makes it easier to respond without rushing into the wrong decision.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a real shift in the conversations happening around AI.

Not that long ago, people were asking what it might be able to do.

Now they’re talking about what it’s already doing.

People are comparing different tools, sharing how much time they’ve saved and swapping ideas on everything from meeting notes and task creation to document generation and form filling.

I found myself reading one of those discussions this week and it really got me thinking.

Interestingly, nobody was talking about replacing advisers.

Or technical judgement.

Or suitability.

Instead, they were talking about saving time.

That felt significant.

Because maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Rather than asking whether AI can produce a document, perhaps we should be asking what becomes more valuable once producing the document takes less time.

That thought stayed with me throughout the week, particularly because of the conversations I was having with advice firms.

One firm got in touch on a Friday. We met on the Monday, agreed everything by Wednesday, completed the onboarding on Thursday and had them ready to send work by Friday. They needed support quickly, but they also wanted a provider willing to fit around the way they already worked, rather than asking them to adopt someone else’s templates and processes.

Another firm wasn’t in a hurry at all. They wanted another conversation, more technical information and time to complete their own due diligence before making a decision.

One of our existing clients asked what the maximum level of support we could provide over the next six months would be as their business continues to grow.

Another firm asked whether, once we’d completed the suitability report, we could also take ownership of implementing the advice across every case we worked on.

And one conversation stood out more than any other.

The firm already had an in-house team.

They weren’t looking to replace it.

They wanted experienced technical support around a less experienced team. People they could bounce ideas off, challenge difficult cases with and help develop confidence over time.

When I looked back over the week, something became obvious.

None of those conversations were really about report writing.

They were about confidence.

Ownership.

Consistency.

Experience.

They were about knowing there was someone there when capacity suddenly changed, when a complex case landed on the desk, or when another perspective would help strengthen a recommendation.

That feels like quite a significant shift.

For years, much of the conversation around outsourced support has centred on producing suitability reports.

Can you write the report?

How quickly can you turn it around?

How much does it cost?

Those questions still matter.

But increasingly, I’m hearing different ones.

Can you support our team?

Can you help us improve consistency?

Can you take ownership of implementation?

Can you strengthen our processes?

Can you adapt to the way our business already works?

They’re very different conversations.

And I don’t think many people would argue that technology is going to take more of the repetitive work off our desks over the next few years.

Personally, I think that’s a positive thing.

If technology can reduce the time spent formatting documents, moving information between systems or producing a first draft, it gives us more time to focus on the things that genuinely improve advice.

Technical judgement.

Critical thinking.

Supporting advisers.

Developing less experienced team members.

Improving operational consistency.

Strengthening the evidence behind recommendations.

Maybe that’s where the real value has always been.

For me, the more interesting question isn’t whether technology can produce a document.

It’s whether it can help firms produce better, more consistent advice.

Can it identify missing information before a case progresses?

Can it highlight inconsistencies that might otherwise be missed?

Can it strengthen the evidence behind a recommendation?

Can it give firms greater oversight across every case, rather than just the ones selected for review?

Those feel like much more valuable questions.

And I suspect they’re the conversations we’ll be having far more often over the next few years.

Technology will continue to evolve.

So will the way we all work.

But I don’t believe the future is about replacing people.

I think it’s about giving experienced professionals more time to do the things technology can’t.

To challenge.

To question.

To coach.

To improve.

And ultimately, to help firms deliver better advice.

I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts.

Has technology changed what you expect from suitability support, or has it simply changed where you think the real value now sits?

Further Reading

If you missed the first edition of Behind Better Advice, you can read it here:

Behind Better Advice

If you’d like to learn more about how we support financial planning firms with suitability consulting, annual reviews and operational support, you’ll find more information here:

Services

Why does every advice firm seem to have a different annual review process?

One of the things I enjoy most about my role is seeing how different advice firms operate behind the scenes.

Over the years, we’ve worked with firms of all shapes and sizes. Some have dedicated paraplanning teams. Some have one adviser doing almost everything. Others sit somewhere in the middle.

Recently, I came across a discussion between advisers that asked what sounded like a simple question:

“How do you collect client information before an annual review?”

The replies were fascinating.

Some firms send digital fact finds. Others rely on client portals. Some still post paper forms. Quite a few said they’d stopped asking clients to complete anything beforehand and simply update everything during the meeting instead.

There wasn’t a right answer.

There wasn’t even a common answer.

Everyone had developed a process that worked for their business, their clients and their team.

It made me realise something.

Perhaps the challenge isn’t finding the perfect annual review process.

Perhaps it’s recognising that every advice business is trying to solve a slightly different problem.

Annual reviews aren’t the difficult part

When people talk about annual reviews, they often picture the meeting itself or the suitability report that follows.

In reality, they’re only a small part of the overall process.

Long before an adviser sits down with a client, somebody has contacted them, arranged the meeting, gathered information, updated records, requested valuations and made sure everything is ready.

After the meeting, the work continues.

Recommendations need implementing.

Providers need chasing.

Platforms need updating.

Suitability reports need preparing.

Actions need recording.

Then, while all of that is happening, the day-to-day servicing doesn’t stop.

Client emails still arrive.

Withdrawal requests still need processing.

Addresses change.

Direct debits need amending.

New clients need onboarding.

It isn’t one task that consumes time.

It’s the accumulation of hundreds of smaller ones.

Why every firm looks different

Reading through that discussion, one thing became obvious.

The technology wasn’t really the issue.

Some firms had excellent systems.

Others preferred simpler processes.

Some had embraced automation.

Others deliberately hadn’t.

The common challenge wasn’t software.

It was people.

Clients don’t always complete forms.

Sometimes they don’t understand what’s being asked.

Sometimes they forget.

Sometimes they only remember something important once they’re sitting in front of their adviser.

That’s why there probably isn’t a single “best” annual review process.

Good firms build one that works for their clients, not somebody else’s.

What we’ve learnt

One of the biggest lessons we’ve learnt from working alongside advice firms is that structure matters far more than standardisation.

No two firms operate in exactly the same way.

Some want support preparing annual reviews.

Others want help managing implementation.

Some need somebody to own provider chasing and back-office updates.

Others are looking for support with onboarding, workflow design or simply making better use of their CRM.

Trying to force every business into the same process rarely works.

The best servicing models are built around the business, not the other way round.

Behind Better Advice

Over the coming months, I’ll be sharing a series called Behind Better Advice.

Each edition will look at a real project we’ve worked on (anonymised where appropriate), the operational challenge behind it and the practical lessons we learnt along the way.

Next week we’ll be publishing the first downloadable case study.

It follows a Paradigm member firm that wanted to strengthen the structure behind its annual reviews and ongoing client servicing. Rather than creating a completely new process, we worked together to build a servicing model around the way the business already operated.

I hope it’ll be useful for firms reviewing their own servicing models, whether they’re looking to make small improvements or thinking more broadly about how work flows through the business.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you were designing your annual review process from scratch today, what would you do differently?

Further Reading

If this has got you thinking about how your own annual review process is structured, you can find out more about how we support firms with suitability consulting, annual reviews and ongoing client servicing here:

🔗 Suitability Consulting Support

Next week, we’ll also be publishing the first Behind Better Advice case study, Building a Bespoke Client Servicing Model.

It takes a closer look at how we worked with a Paradigm member firm to design a servicing model around the way they already operated, covering everything from annual reviews and implementation through to workflow design and ongoing client servicing.

I hope you’ll find it useful.