Most advisers can picture the moment. A client sitting across the table from you, maybe a year or two out from retirement. You’ve talked them through the fact-find, the risk profile, the recommended portfolio. Everything is documented, everything is signed off. Then, quite often near the end, they ask the question they came in with all along.
“So, will I be alright, have I got enough?”
You have a chart. You have numbers. You’ve spent real time on the assumptions behind them. And if you’re being honest, the confidence in that projection is not quite the same as the confidence you have in the portfolio behind it.
That isn’t for want of effort. Cashflow modelling is a core part of the retirement advice process, and advisers spend hours sorting the inputs, testing the assumptions and refining the picture. The limit tends to sit in the tools themselves. Most rely on a national longevity average, and on a generic return assumption that isn’t tied to the portfolio you’ve actually recommended. Two halves of the same story, and the evidence underneath them isn’t quite pulling in the same direction.
That gap is part of what makes the client conversation feel slightly off, even when everything technically holds together. And under Consumer Duty, evidencing that you’ve avoided foreseeable harm gets harder when the two sides of the Centralised Retirement Proposition are not really in conversation with each other.
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