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Alan McCarthy, Head of Distribution, looks ahead to what the rest of 2025 may bring for Standard Life and how we can continue to support you and your clients throughout the year.
Standard Life’s vision for 2025
Our vision is to lead the way and redefine excellence in the retirement space.
To focus our efforts, we’ve identified three key areas:
1. Second Life
We’ll continue to enhance our retirement specialism through the Second Life initiative, which encompasses pillars such as End of Career Guidance Counsellor, Better with Age, and Women and Pensions.
These pillars are designed to provide impactful and practical content, supporting you in navigating your clients on the journey to and through retirement. Our approach ensures a balanced and informed perspective on retirement readiness, focusing on three key indicators:
• Purposefully engaged
• Socially connected
• Financially prepared
2. Promotion of financial planning
Financial planning is central to our profession and delivers significant value to the end client. Clients increasingly want to play an active role in their financial journey, and adopting a holistic and proactive approach will lead to better outcomes and long-term value. We describe this approach as striking the right balance between the human side and the financial side of money.
3. Adviser partnership
Our partnership model emphasizes collaboration between you and providers like us, to deliver exceptional outcomes for clients. When done correctly, this simple yet effective approach ensures the profession thrives and clients receive added value.
Opportunities and challenges we face
1. Engagement
The biggest opportunity for us all lies in client engagement. The more we can work together to engage, educate, and empower clients, the better. Helping clients take control of their future planning has far-reaching and positive effects.
Our greatest challenge mirrors our greatest opportunity: keeping clients on the right path amidst distractions and promises of short-term gains.
To address this, we must focus on consistent engagement, education, and influence to guide you and your clients through life and market events.
2. Market focus on PRSA
This year, it’s likely the market will focus on PRSA – with the need to transition all existing EPP business into either a PRSA or Mastertrust, you’ll need to plan and execute in an efficient manner.
Our consistent view is that the PRSA is the product of choice - flexible, clear and ultimately you and your clients have control.
Areas to keep an eye on for 2025
Looking ahead to some trends for 2025, here are three key areas to keep an eye open for;
1. Post-retirement proposition
The rise of bespoke post-retirement journey – mixing guaranteed income solutions (annuities) and multiple drawdown products (Vested PRSAs etc) – will be a major focus.
2. Client engagement
This metric will become increasing important and perhaps will outshine traditional metrics such as AUM in time.
3. Women and Pensions
Inspiring more conversations with your female clients on retirement planning has been a big focus for us and will continue to grow into 2025.