Author: Aisha Mahmood
Aisha Mahmood
Aisha Mahmood trained in economics and spent ten years in financial planning before moving to journalism. She worked at a fee-based advisory firm, specialising in retirement income and intergenerational wealth planning, and spent two years at a robo-advisor building the content that was supposed to make people trust algorithms with their pensions. She writes about savings, pensions, tax-efficient investing, and the personal finance decisions that keep people awake at three in the morning. She explains jargon only when she has to and cuts it when she can. Aisha lives in Birmingham. She thinks financial literacy should be on the national curriculum and that most savings ads are aspirational fiction.
AI chatbot financial advice is changing the texture of client meetings in ways that have received little attention: not by replacing advisers, but by inserting a permanent, argumentative third party into the relationship. An adviser writing on the Boring Money website described the experience with some candour. Several clients had arrived with information gathered from ChatGPT, close to accusing him of giving incorrect guidance. He would spend time correcting the errors, only for the client to feed his corrections back into the chatbot and return with a fresh round of questions. ‘Recently this has been sapping the life out of…
HMRC inheritance tax underpayment by wealthy individuals has reached a suspected £392m for the year to 31 March 2026, a rise of 14% from £344m a year earlier, according to TWM Solicitors, and that figure sits within a broader picture of intensifying HMRC enforcement that investors and executors would do well to take seriously.For savers approaching retirement or managing an estate, the direction of travel here matters as much as the headline number. HMRC’s analytical capabilities are expanding, and the agency’s definition of ‘wealthy’ is wider than many assume. According to Money Marketing, HMRC classifies someone as wealthy if they…
The FCA pension withdrawal surge recorded in 2025/26 has laid bare just how profoundly tax uncertainty is reshaping retirement behaviour, with £91.2 billion withdrawn from pension pots accessed for the first time in the year, according to new Financial Conduct Authority figures. That represents a 22% rise from £75 billion the previous year and is 70% higher than the £53.6 billion recorded in 2023/24. What the FCA pension withdrawal surge tells portfolio managers The pace of withdrawals has comfortably outrun the growth in the number of pots being accessed. The number of pensions accessed for the first time rose 7%…
The pension withdrawal surge in 2025/26 has produced figures that any long-term portfolio planner should read carefully: £91.2bn was withdrawn from pension pots accessed for the first time, a 22% rise from £75bn the previous year and 70% higher than the £53.6bn recorded in 2023/24, according to new data from the Financial Conduct Authority. The number of pensions being accessed rose only 7% year-on-year to just over 1.04 million, meaning the average sum leaving each pot has grown considerably.Why the Pension Withdrawal Surge in 2025 Is More Than a HeadlineThe gap between the 22% increase in money withdrawn and the…
The gender pensions gap retirement problem is being misdiagnosed, and the consequences of that misdiagnosis will fall hardest on women approaching the end of their working lives. Caitlin Southall, director of SSAS transformation and proposition at WBR Group, argues that framing the gap as a savings shortfall is too narrow a lens, and the evidence increasingly supports her view.The Pensions Policy Institute published research showing that women aged 55 to 59 hold around 54% of the pension wealth of their male counterparts in the UK. More revealing still, solving the gender pay gap in isolation would leave women with only…
RBC Brewin Dolphin’s head of intermediaries, Ian Kloss, has placed clear, jargon-free communication at the centre of what good investment advice looks like, arguing that the ability to explain a portfolio as if the client knows nothing is not a soft skill but a professional discipline. For advisers managing clients who are approaching or already in retirement, that framing carries real weight: a client who does not understand what they own is a client who may panic at the wrong moment, with consequences for sequence-of-returns risk that no asset allocation model can fully offset.The case for plain-language portfolio communicationThe phrase…
UK D2C market growth is running “much faster” than the adviser platforms market, according to Platforum’s latest ‘UK D2C: Investor Experience’ report, the final instalment in its 2026 UK D2C series. The findings carry real implications for self-directed investors managing their own ISAs or SIPPs, particularly those watching platform costs erode their long-term returns. Neo-Brokers Drive UK D2C Market Growth With Mobile-First Appeal The headline numbers are difficult to ignore. Trading 212 and InvestEngine both recorded customer growth of 50% year-on-year, while Freetrade almost doubled its user base. According to Trust Intelligence, Freetrade has now built a following of 1.6…
HENRYs financial advice demand is running at its highest recorded level in Quilter’s latest research, with 84% of high earners, not rich yet (HENRYs) saying they would consider taking financial advice in future, according to the firm’s Value of Advice Report. Conducted by Boring Money and based on research with more than 2,000 people who have never received financial advice, the report paints a picture of a generation that recognises its own knowledge gaps but has not yet bridged them with professional support.For a portfolio-focused reader, the headline statistic matters less than what it implies about timing. HENRYs are typically…
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has signalled a decisive shift in ambition for the FCA tokenisation roadmap, calling for the UK to move beyond test environments and create the infrastructure for tokenised assets to operate at scale across wholesale markets. Speaking at a City of London dinner on 22 September, FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi said the era of pilots and sandboxes had run its course, with firms now seeking what he described as “full production and permanence.”For investors and portfolio managers watching from the sidelines, the question is not whether tokenisation will arrive in wholesale markets, but at what…
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