Mark Ormston is a superhero

There is a great report from the FCA hiding behind Mark’s comments and you can check it out more easily using this link to the FCA website.

Mark is modest for  his firm , Retirement Line – the annuity broker .  The story of Retirement Line is an extraordinary recovery from the calamity of the 2014 budget. Broking is not mainstream but it is dependable – Retirement Line particularly.

Many of my generation are beneficiaries of the upturn in pension annuity rates.

One of my closest friends has just benefited from that firm’s help in placing the proceeds of her money purchase annuities. I am hearing of more sophistication in the annuity purchasing market like hers (she had no adviser)

She bought a bridging pension to take her to the point in a few years when the state pension cuts in. It was tax-efficient, properly explained  and has been brilliantly executed. I do not hear complaints about Retirement Line or other brokers of annuities in the UK – we have a brilliant service and it’s clear that more and more people are purchasing annuities through them.

The FCA provides an interactive dashboard which covers

• Overview of pension pots accessed for the first time
• Pension plans accessed by pot size and age
• Number of plans where the plan holder(s) made regular partial withdrawals by annual rate of withdrawal, pot size and age band
• Use of advice and Pension Wise guidance when purchasing retirement products
• Other metrics such as, the number of defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension transfers received, types of annuity options sold and sources of business for annuities and drawdown providers.

I suspect that a weekend’s study will give me more insights but I will expand on what Mark is saying (he is a superhero!).

As Mark points out, people are purchasing their annuities using the open market and (he says this very quietly) he is pointing out that people are executing through firms like his.

There is a conflict for many advisers where a direct relationship with the insurer cuts out the pension from funds under advice. There is a move to include annuities inside a fund wrapper to allow advisers to take an advisory charge on income being paid (akin to an institutional buy-in). I see this as a different conflict of interest for advisers, the interests of an annuitant are best served by being left alone to enjoy security in retirement (IMO)!

The message from the FCA is that Drawdown and Encashment are still the major means of getting money from the pension pot but the more sophisticated use of UFPLS (a first stop to turning pots to pensions IMO) had a fall in early 2025. So did the purchase of annuities (in numbers). I’d love to know from Retirement Line if they are seeing a “real” increase in the purchase price of annuities.

I would be interested to know why the first quarter was weak for what I consider more sophisticated approaches. It would be easy to speculate that it was linked to unstable markets resulting from concerns about what Trump and America were doing with tariffs. This however does not explain the heroic and steady growth in drawdown!

There is growth in the market through drawdown and advisers but half of the amounts being drawn down  is now “non-advised” suggesting Pension Wise is helping and that dealing direct with DC providers is leading to more take up (targeted support will impact increasingly).

There is much more to tease out of this FCA information but let me leave readers with these interactive tables  which give us a fascinating insight into what is going on at the more sophisticated end of the pensions market where people are making their own way into retirement plans.

Thanks again to Mark Ormston for setting me on my way, I hope my readers will look at these charts and the many not published and draw their own conclusions.

My suspicion is that there is an equivalent set of charts for those in defined benefit pension schemes. These people are being paid pensions without the choices within the advisory and annuity broking markets. The numbers of opt-outs of DB pensions is down to virtually zero. I wonder how opt-outs from DC pensions will influence the drawdown and annuity markets in years to come.