TPR and FCA have done a joint podcast.
Listening to “Guided retirement and helping savers make the right decisions” at https://t.co/JotfjdxaYE
— Henry Tapper (@henryhtapper) August 23, 2025
The FCA will support “Targeted support” and TPR’s guided retirement will give people the help they need on what the options are.
Only about 9% of people take regulated advice, most people receive unregulated advice from social media and chats with family.
The targeted support assumes that there is some engagement from people who are interested in what they can do, TPR’s guided retirement is about guiding people into “the right default”.
This is where I lose Patrick Coyne as you can’t have multiple defaults, you can only have one. This is the difficulty with TPR’s concept of “different people need different strategies to be defaulted in”. People who need to be told what to do want more than guidance, they want to be told what will happen if they don’t take a decision.
The FCA has got the best data about what people actually do, I reported on the FCA data and the work done by Ignition House earlier in the year. Value for Money really does depend on good quality of data and that means a lot of it.
Most decision making is recorded on paper and is not telling us what people are actually doing before taking a decision.
It’s mad to think that trustees have the capacity to support often thousands of people who are in the process of turning pots to a retirement plan. They simply aren’t geared for doing this and the commercial ones such as Nest , there won’t be advisers or even people offering a variety of default choices. At best there will be an instruction to go see an adviser.
Innovation is of course part of the answer and this is discussed by Nike and Patrick. Nike is absolutely right in pointing out that products will enable people to take decisions through AI targeted support. That’s support that means that people can get their money without losing it to opportunity (investment), tax (taking money as capital when not needed) and scams (where transfers to the wrong kind of products) is a threat.
We are struggling how collective products (what pensions used to be) collective decisions were default. You had to work hard getting out of a pension. The new style of personal pension has out all the decision making (and risk) transferred to individuals.
Patrick says that 14m people are heading to underpowered private pensions (coincidentally about the number of pots held by Nest). If we take Nest as the biggest example of what can go right, then what it offers becomes pretty important.
There’s a consultation out on this and I will be spending part of the long bank holiday weekend considering it , through the lens of someone who looks at products as offering “value for money“.
I think that Patrick and Nike can do well to use how people consider value for money at retirement in shaping the rules for “guided retirement” through “targeted support”. The responsibility for the Trustees is to make sure defaults are fit for purpose and properly understood, it is not to recommend a range of defaults to savers.
It may be that employers using multi-employer master trusts offer different workforces different defaults but that can only happen at super-scale (think Tesco within L&G’s master trust with 220,000 workforce who may have their own views), but for the most part, schemes are going to have to be a lot more brutal with defaults than TPR are making out.
