WTW is planning to grow its financial planning team because it sees a growing demand for this service from members of its master trust.
WTW's Lifesight multi-employer master trust has £14bn in assets and 350,000 individual members and it already employs a number of financial planners to work with the senior executives employed by the institutional clients.
It has recently agreed a partnership with Atomos, the wealth management and advice firm formerly known as Sanlam, where it runs the multi-asset strategies and advises on the model portfolios.
But Mark Calnan, WTW's European head of investments, said the growing “convergence” between the needs of institutional and advised clients meant the copany was looking to grow in the financial planning and DFM market,
He said: “With Atomos we have an exclusivity agreement and work with them on advice and investment management.
"With the changing face of retirement, with people living longer, we want to be as relevant to those 350,000 individual members as we can be, and we want to do that both by growing the number of financial planners we employ and through Atomos, which of course is an advice firm on a bigger scale. We see increased demand from the members of our master trust for additional advice.”
On the advice side, Calnan believes people living longer in retirement means an individual needs greater help on the financial planning side than was the case in the past, when an annuity was the default option.
Last year the company rebranded from Willis Towers Watson to WTW to reflect the "clarity and actionable solutions" it provides.
The second area of expansion into the UK wholesale market is through the creation of unitised investment products which can be accessed by all advisers.
It is part of the contract WTW has with Atomos that it must create these products, initially for Atomos clients, and then for the wider market.
Calnan’s present expectation is that these products will come to market later in 2023.
On the investment management side, he believes WTW's scale will give it an advantage, as it can “look under more stones” to find a wider range of investment opportunities for clients.
Calnan said: “We have 150 people who wake up every day and think about investment markets. In generally benign times, one can have a simple portfolio of bonds and equities and it can deliver the financial outcomes that end clients want.
"But in the more volatile times, I think there is a need for more than that, with exposure to alternative asset classes and fund managers. With 150 people on this, very few firms have that sort of scale available to advised clients. And we also want to use the scale in a way that benefits end clients, because of our size, we can negotiate with the fund providers on fees, and quite often it can be cheaper for the end client, even after they pay our fee, because of the negotiated discount with the asset manager.”
He added that the scale also means his firm don’t have to just accept a fund as it is, but can create segregated mandates to develop a third party fund along the lines they want.
david.thorpe@ft.com
