New data from Amundi’s latest Decoding Investors study underlines a widening gap in financial advice retirement confidence: half of investors who receive professional advice say they are very confident about funding their retirement, compared with just 14% of those who have never accessed advice. For anyone managing a self-invested personal pension (SIPP) or drawing down in later life, that gap deserves careful attention.
What the Advice Gap Means for Portfolio Planning
Confidence alone does not pay retirement income, but it tends to correlate with better-structured portfolios and more consistent saving behaviour. The Amundi findings arrive at a moment when personal savings and investments are carrying more of the retirement burden as defined-benefit schemes continue to close to new entrants. A well-advised investor is more likely to have stress-tested their drawdown assumptions against sequence-of-returns risk, which is the danger that poor market returns in the early years of retirement permanently impair a portfolio that is simultaneously being drawn upon.
Separately, PensionBee has published research showing that 45% of UK adults prioritise owning their home outright over building a large pension pot, with 36% taking the opposite view. Perhaps more revealing is that 51% said they would delay retirement to own their home outright. Becky O’Connor, head of pensions at PensionBee, put it plainly: ‘The difficulty of achieving the twin major life goals of home ownership and decent pension savings has never been so apparent and the prospect that a sizeable proportion of people will not manage to achieve both is something that policymakers cannot ignore.’
The numbers framing that dilemma are sobering. PensionBee estimates that renting a two-bedroom home throughout retirement could cost between £200,000 and £400,000. Against that, the median private pension wealth among 60-to-64-year-olds stands at £154,000, while the average UK house price is £270,000, rising to £553,000 in London. For anyone approaching retirement without either a paid-off property or a substantial pension, the asset-allocation decisions made in the next decade become considerably more consequential.
FCA Warnings on Debt Advice and the Financial Advice Retirement Confidence Link
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has raised concerns that consumers seeking help with debt are being directed towards fee-paying solutions that may not suit their circumstances. The regulator said some consumers were subjected to high-pressure sales tactics, given misleading information, or advised by firms lacking the appropriate permissions. Consumers should be alert to any firm pressing them to commit to a debt solution quickly, particularly following an online enquiry or an unexpected phone call. The warning matters for the broader retirement planning picture because poorly managed debt can erode the savings runway that makes a confident retirement possible in the first place.
The FCA’s interest in how consumers are served by financial services technology extends well beyond debt advice. On 6 July 2026, the regulator published the Mills Review, examining how advances in artificial intelligence could transform retail financial services by 2030, according to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. The review sets out an automation spectrum from Level 1 (AI as a basic tool) to Level 5 (full automation, with no human adviser in the loop).
That framework has become the lens through which advice firms are reading Anthropic’s recent announcement of Claude for Financial Advisors. Ben Goss, chief executive of Dynamic Planner, posed the question directly: is this a Level 5 land grab that eventually displaces advisers, or is it, as Anthropic describes it, a Level 1 or 2 collaborator that removes friction from repetitive workflows? The answer matters because, according to Coursiv, Anthropic’s Cowork platform, launched in February 2026, already embeds Claude directly inside Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, PowerPoint, Slack, Gmail and Google Drive simultaneously, suggesting the infrastructure for deeper automation is already in place.
For clients, the technology question may be secondary to the human one. As Chris Hogarth, strategy and propositions director at Succession Wealth, observed, clients are unlikely to recall which cashflow modelling software was used in a meeting. What they remember is whether the adviser understood what they wanted from life and helped them decide with confidence. That observation cuts to the heart of why financial advice retirement confidence scores so strongly in the Amundi data: the tool matters far less than the relationship it supports.
