Retirement strategies need to be more robust than ever. Regulatory expectations around evidencing outcomes, managing any risks to income generation and demonstrating value are rising. Responsibility is falling more on individuals, who must manage more varied income sources and are often working with weaker provision. As a result, the cost of poor decisions can be increasingly significant.

But retirement strategies should also be flexible. The recent changes to the inheritance tax treatment of pensions have unnerved many advisers, highlighting the need for adaptability. Advisers have been revisiting long-held assumptions about how retirement wealth should be accumulated, accessed and passed on. In the latest research from BNY Investments and NextWealth – “Retirement Advice in the UK: Turning Insight into Outcomes” – 77% of financial advisers say the inheritance tax policy reform is driving change at their firm, while almost half of advisers cite proposed and potential tax changes as their clients’ top concern.

Any retirement strategy needs to incorporate the emotional elements of retirement too. Advisers are increasingly valued not just as technical experts, but as interpreters, guides and even counsellors at this vital life stage. 

It is tempting to suggest that no centralised retirement proposition (CRP) could fulfil these competing requirements. However, retirement plans have always had to cope with flux. One adviser told the report’s authors: “I was around when pension simplification came out and you could say the same. The landscape around retirement planning is dynamic, and it always has been.” The underlying principles of good retirement planning are still the same.

Bringing structure to retirement complexity

There has been an increase in the number of advisers implementing CRPs, with 18% of financial advisers saying their firm has introduced one in the past year, according to our research. In addition, more than three quarters of advisers say their firm has made changes in response to the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Consumer Duty, and 68% in response to the regulator’s retirement income advice review.

For a third of advisers who have moved to a more common and consistent approach to retirement planning, meeting FCA expectations was the primary driver. However, the sheer complexity and demands of modern retirement are also powerful drivers of adoption. While some firms resist the CRP label, many are effectively building the components in practice, setting out common approaches to income risk, sequencing, sustainability and review.

For the firms still holding out, the worry is that CRPs can be too formulaic and constricting. However, a good CRP should not proscribe a single correct solution for every client, but deliver a repeatable way of building objectives, testing sustainability, and deciding when to introduce guarantees or change withdrawal patterns.

From rules of thumb to tailored strategies

There are clear areas where the adoption of a CRP could improve outcomes for clients. For example, in spite of the growing complexity, many advisers are still relying on a simple ‘rule of thumb’ for sustainable withdrawals, with nearly half of advisers using a fixed rate to determine a safe level of withdrawals for drawdown clients.

But better practice is emerging. Some now adapt these rules of thumb to reflect client-specific factors, including the level of guaranteed income, health and longevity expectations, planned changes in spending over retirement, and other alternative income sources. Meanwhile, 64% of advisers surveyed now use a cash-flow modelling tool to determine a safe withdrawal rate for clients. This is a key area in which consistency of approach is being tightened.

One proposition lead with a team of over 200 advisers said: “We don't have a house view on a level of sustainability for income. We believe in tailoring the sustainable rate for each client and structuring it on that basis, using our core offerings. I’ve knocked up a tool that I use to position this to our C-suite about how many different retirement income strategies there are. And if you were to build a true sustainable income withdrawal rate, you would have to consider around 14 different strategies of retirement income, and you’d have to run your assessment against those every year.”

Another independent adviser with a team of 30 said the approach should always be determined on a client-by-client basis. “It isn’t, ‘your safe withdrawal rate is 4% or 5% or 6%’; it’s whatever it looks like to get you to life expectancy plus 10 years for both of you. We look at that every year during the annual review.”

More worryingly, the research found that 29% of advisers use the same approach to assessing risk for clients in retirement as in accumulation. This is a key area that the retirement income advice review sought to challenge and neglects the pre and post-retirement reality for many clients.

Advisers point to evidence of sub-optimal withdrawal behaviour in the wider market, including the full encashment of large pension pots and high withdrawal rates being set without sufficient consideration of sequencing risk or long-term sustainability. One financial planner said: “I look at the FCA retirement income data on a regular basis and there are real causes for concern, like people cashing in pots over a quarter of a million and therefore paying tax at the highest rate.” It is not clear that all these people are advised, but it shows the extent of poor practice.

Advisers are increasingly formalising their retirement strategies for clients in response to a rapidly changing landscape. A modern CRP needs to fulfil a range of criteria, but operating without one looks increasingly risky as retirement becomes more complex. 
 

Research conducted by NextWealth for BNY Investments, based on responses to surveys with 207 retirement-focused financial advisers and 260 consumers of financial advice conducted in November 2025.