Assets held in discretionary model portfolio services (MPS) are on course to pass £250 billion before the end of 2026, with Platforum reporting that MPS assets under management reached more than £240 billion at the end of June, up 12.5% during the first half of the year and 19.7% year-on-year.
MPS Assets Under Management: The Growth Trajectory
The pace of growth is worth pausing on. According to The Wealth Mosaic, MPS assets under management stood at £214 billion at the end of 2025, which means the market added roughly £26 billion in the first six months of 2026 alone. Platforum has also indicated the market could approach £500 billion by the end of 2030, a projection that reflects the sustained shift among adviser firms towards outsourced investment management.
The structural driver is straightforward: advisers facing growing compliance burdens and Consumer Duty obligations are increasingly choosing to delegate portfolio construction to discretionary managers, freeing capacity for client-facing planning work. Adviser demand, rather than pure market appreciation, appears to be the primary engine here.
For a long-term saver or SIPP investor reviewing their arrangements, the expansion of the MPS market matters because it broadens the range of risk-profiled, cost-efficient solutions available through platforms. Over a five-to-ten-year accumulation horizon, consistent access to a diversified, rebalanced model portfolio can contribute meaningfully to sequence-of-returns management.
What Rapid Growth Means for Portfolio Investors
That said, size is not the same as quality. As assets flow into MPS solutions at scale, investors and their advisers should scrutinise the underlying diversification, the rebalancing discipline, and the total cost at the platform plus model portfolio level. A vehicle growing this quickly will inevitably attract providers of varying quality alongside the established names.
For those in drawdown, the case for an MPS rests heavily on whether the chosen risk profile genuinely matches spending needs and time horizon. A 60/40 growth model is not a capital preservation vehicle, whatever the marketing suggests.
Children’s Pensions and the Inheritance Tax Calculation
Elsewhere in the market, around 35,000 children received payments into pension pots over the past year as families sought to reduce potential inheritance tax liabilities, according to Lubbock Fine Wealth Management. A total of £68.4 million was paid into pensions for children under 18 during the period, the firm said.
The logic is straightforward in principle: pension assets generally sit outside an individual’s estate for inheritance tax purposes, so funding a child’s pension early can reduce a taxable estate while also establishing a long-term savings habit. In practice, the rules governing contributions for non-earners, currently capped at £3,600 gross per tax year, mean families need to plan across multiple years to move material sums. Anyone considering this route should take regulated advice, because the interaction between pension rules, gifting exemptions and estate planning is nuanced and subject to legislative change.
This is a long-horizon strategy by definition. A pension funded today for a young child will not be accessible for decades, which means the capital is genuinely committed. For families with estate planning objectives and sufficient liquidity elsewhere, that illiquidity is a feature rather than a flaw. For those who may need access to those funds, it is a meaningful constraint worth modelling carefully before committing.
The broader picture emerging from both stories is one of growing sophistication among UK savers and their advisers: structured outsourcing of investment management through MPS, and structured multigenerational planning through children’s pensions. The Platforum projection of a market approaching £500 billion by 2030 suggests that trajectory is still in its earlier stages.
