Increasingly clients demand different strategies in solutions. It’s incumbent to think more broadly than traditionally.
You can’t be too big. It’s just an issue of trying to get the economies of scale to apply in the right way.
It’s wonderful people have more flexibility. It’s right that you should have the ability to do with your money what you want, when you want.
It’s great that people are going to have guidance at retirement. But people would benefit from having guidance earlier and having consistent messaging.
Provided we create the necessary tools, we can minimise the chances of people spending all of their money. I don’t think you can ever stop it entirely.
I’d like to think if someone has saved into a pension scheme or a long-term savings vehicle that they’re not just going to go out and blow it. You can trust people if they’ve got into that habit of saving.
We’re all living a lot longer and we haven’t been saving as much as previous generations. The pot people have may be the biggest pot of money they’ve ever come across, but is it actually big enough to last their retirement?
People no longer need to buy an annuity, but when you ask people what they want to achieve post-retirement from their pots, it sounds very much like an annuity. They want certainty, safety, and want to understand that the money they can get won’t go down.
I welcome what Pfeg in particular has achieved in terms of getting personal finance onto the school curriculum. But, being honest, it’s only in half of the schools’ and it’s down to the local education authority whether they actually implement it.
There’s a huge amount of knowledge within our industry. We work with our clients and help them understand macro trends, markets, so they can then deliver those messages and how products fit in client solutions.
We could do something similar with education. Being centrally coordinated so it’s consistent would help.
You deliver it early and consistently, you don’t stop when people leave school. Give them the basics, reinforce it consistently, then you can make changes. But it will take a generation.
We used to have two thirds of people in pension schemes, that dropped down to a third. We’re back up to just under a half thanks to auto-enrolment.
We need to change the attitudes and the culture of our country. If we don’t, in about 20 years time we’re going to reach a tipping point where a generation retires considerably worse off than the previous, and then it gets much worse.
We’d like a savings minister at the heart of government. Someone that champions investing, champions savings, thinks more holistically of government legislation.
Long term care sits in the department of health, education sits in the department for education. There are lots of policies that need to be owned from a savings perspective to make sure there are no unintended consequences of government policy for the savings environment.
The FCA’s desire to look through the front windscreen rather the rear view mirror is definitely welcomed. There’s no point trying to regulate the previous crisis if the next one is not going to be the same; you’d be very unlucky – or very stupid – to suffer the same thing twice.
When I was young, what I wanted to be when I grew up, was an officer in the Royal Navy. Now when I grow up, I want to be a history professor.
