Luton & Hertfordshire Half Day Financial Services Conference

“Retirement Reimagined – Advice for a changing world”.

Retirement planning is evolving. Today's retirees face a more complex landscape than ever before, shaped by changing market conditions, longer life expectancies, shifting retirement aspirations, and increasingly diverse client needs. As advisers, understanding what drives the key client decision-making has never been more important.

This session explores how behavioural science, client demographics, and your retirement proposition design can work together to improve retirement outcomes. We'll examine how attitudes towards financial risk can differ across gender, age, and life experiences, and what those differences mean for delivering truly personalised retirement advice.

Learning objectives:

• Examine how a deeper understanding of client attitudes towards financial risk can vary (based on gender, age, life experiences) and the impact that has on what an optimal client experience and outcome looks like.
• Discuss the psychology of investing and how you can recognise and mitigate behavioural biases to support client composure.

Evaluate the benefits of a Centralised Retirement Proposition (CRP) and adopt one to enhance retirement portfolios

Title: Gifting out of surplus income: why April 2027 changes the picture

Learning objectives

By the end of this session, delegates will be able to:

1. Explain how bringing unused pension funds into the estate from 6 April 2027 changes the case for gifting out of surplus income, and identify which clients it now matters for.
2. Apply the three conditions of the exemption in s.21 IHTA 1984 to a client's circumstances: the gifts are part of normal expenditure, made out of income, and leave the client able to keep their usual standard of living.
3. Tell income apart from capital for s.21 purposes, including pension withdrawals and the areas where the position is still disputed.
4. Describe why recent First-tier Tribunal cases were lost on the "normal pattern" test rather than on the numbers, and set up the year-by-year records executors will need to claim the exemption on form IHT403.
5. Fit gifting from surplus income into advice alongside seven-year gifts and Business Relief, with affordability checks, file notes and good outcomes under Consumer Duty.