Kevin Hollister’s Post

We are very proud to announce Tom McPhail, PPI Governor, policy director at The Lang Cat and former policy head at Hargreaves Lansdown has joined our team of external advisers in a personal capacity. Tom's experience and foresight in pensions products and policy will be invaluable to us. It will also complement our other adviser's knowledge and expertise.

Fantastic to be partnering with HL Workplace on this. More must be done to help support DC members at retirement to make the right choices. Our holistic retirement planning and tracking tools, alongside signposting to HL with their great range of products and support will help provide this.

Great start to the week to be announcing adding interactive investor to our provider panel for all the reasons given below, aside from our favourite vowels.

Great to be invited and enjoyed doing this with James last week. Need to up my game on presentations and stop saying "you know" every other word.

A point from the latest Consumer Duty update that caught my eye.... "We want customers to be sold products that are designed to meet their needs, characteristics and objectives" If you provide a drawdown product where the customer does not receive ongoing advice, how do you do this? It's difficult to see how this can meet their needs and objectives if the customer has not built (and can track/update) an holistic retirement plan, as you simply don't know them. The plan tells you their needs and objectives and the product can then be shown to meet them. Surely it's a case of ....no plan, no understanding of this, no defense if objectives not met?

The #femalepensiongap exists and isn't going away. Employers/schemes need to start doing more to help females plan for #retirement. Our help and tools are free to those that find them, but only 20% who do are female. Help more females find our help by signposting or adopting our tools. Otherwise just keep expecting the same issues year after year. A selection of female reviews below, which seems to show its easy to use and helpful.

Great new addition to our adviser partners and more news on new provider partners coming soon. As well as providing our fully holistic retirement tools to our users, we can now signpost them to great partners who can help them further. Whether they want to manage drawdown themselves, buy some guaranteed income, or want high quality advice to help them decide.

80% of our users are male, 20% are female. People seem to like what we do when they find us! See what they say about us on Trustpilot. But it can be difficult to find us. As we are a free service, we don't spend a lot on marketing. I have no idea of the reason for the disparity above, but what I do know is if we make it easier to find us, more females will use our tools. Females need more help retirement planning because on average they have lower pots. This is possibly due to pay gaps and time off due to career breaks etc. Plus they are lucky enough to live longer, so actually need more on average. For some time now, we have been saying we are happy to give our tools away for free, branded if wanted, if you have a lot of female employees who need help. Just contact us at contact@guiide.co.uk if you want to give your employees all the tools they need to build, test and track a retirement plan at no cost.