Retirement specialist Age Partnership plans to expand its offering to include investment advice early next year.
At the beginning of the year, the company announced plans to enter the advice market with a restricted whole-of-market pension offering. Previously the firm had exclusively offering direct, non-advised sales of retirement products including equity release and annuities, predominantly through its online web portal.
Speaking to FTAdviser, Age Partnership retirement options manager James Dean said the firm is looking at rolling out an investment advice proposition for at- and in-retirement clients in the first or second quarter of 2014.
Mr Dean said the move would not change the focus of the firm, which will remain on the at- or in-retirement market.
Although the firm has not set a definite goal, Mr Dean did say it would look to take on more advisers to compliment its existing four-person pensions team. The firm initially launched its advice offering with a team of two advisers, and later expanded to four in response to high demand.
More recently, Age Partnership struck a deal for compliance service provider SimplyBiz to provide compliance and equity release services to the firm.
“We are seeing clients with really diverse range of needs coming through and it’s obvious that if they have larger funds just buying an annuity isn’t necessarily the right choice for them.
“Rather than saying broad brush investment advice, it’s very much focused on the retirement market because it’s a particular type of investment advice.
“[Clients] can’t replace capital... and as such their profile in terms of style, risk and objectives is very different so if we focus our niche on our particular brand, we will look at how we can actually give that sort of... advice.”
Mr Dean added that while the advice offering had been well received, the past year had been “good but tough” year for its non-advised annuity business due to new competitors entering the market in the wake of the Retail Distribution Review.
“We have had to work hard to maintain our market position. At the beginning of the year we saw a lot of competitors enter the market. Quite a number of those have started to back out.”
