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.
New data from the Financial Conduct Authority has brought the FCA young investor AI trust question into sharp focus, finding that almost half of young investors wrongly believe AI-generated financial information is subject to regulatory oversight. The regulator commissioned the platform Attest to survey 666 UK adults aged 18 to 40 who own or are considering investments, with fieldwork completed on 24 July 2026, according to Fintechly.The findings present a picture that any long-term portfolio manager should take seriously. Young investors are not simply browsing AI tools for curiosity; a meaningful share are treating AI output as they might treat…
New data from the Financial Conduct Authority lays bare the AI investment advice risks facing younger UK investors, with almost half of those surveyed wrongly believing that AI-generated financial information is subject to regulatory oversight. The FCA’s survey covered UK adults aged 18 to 40 who own or are considering investments, and the results raise questions that anyone building a long-term portfolio, or advising one, should sit with carefully. How far trust in AI has outpaced understanding Among respondents, 56% said they trust AI tools to guide financial decisions, outstripping trust in television and radio (47%), the press (46%), and…
The case for a sovereign bond diversification strategy has rarely been more pressing: persistent tensions in the Persian Gulf, a resurgence in global inflation, and a decisive shift at the US Federal Reserve have combined to make the old approach (gilts, US Treasuries, middle-of-the-road duration, set and forget) look increasingly inadequate.David Coombs, head of multi-asset investments at Rathbones Asset Management, sets out the case plainly. Benchmark 10-year yields in the US, UK and France have risen by 0.5 to 0.6 percentage points since the start of the year. Germany, traditionally the paragon of fiscal prudence, has seen its own yields…
Wesleyan’s smoothed fund platform proposition has reached its fifth anniversary in the independent advice market, and the mutual’s managing director of intermediary distribution, Karen Blatchford, says adviser attitudes have shifted considerably since the fund first launched. What began as an unfamiliar brand name in intermediary circles has evolved into a proposition now available on four platforms, with two new fund options added to meet demand across a wider range of client risk profiles.How the Wesleyan Smoothed Fund Platform Broke New GroundWhen Wesleyan first made its smoothed fund available to independent advisers, it was entering largely unfamiliar territory, both for the…
The Aegon Mylo pension app has helped UK savers consolidate more than £250m in savings, drawing together lost and forgotten pension pots into a single, manageable view. For anyone approaching retirement with a career spanning multiple employers, that headline figure deserves a closer look.What the Aegon Mylo pension app actually doesMylo enables workplace pension scheme members to trace and consolidate old pots they may have accumulated across different jobs. According to Corporate Adviser, the app has now attracted over 166,000 registered users and facilitated the consolidation of more than 21,000 individual pots. Aegon has said it will continue to invest…
Protection demand heatwave data collected by iPipeline points to a 12% fall in new business activity during two weeks of record-breaking temperatures, raising an uncomfortable question: how well does the protection industry actually understand what drives consumer behaviour? The weeks in question began on 25 May and 22 June, both periods of extreme heat accompanied by red warnings. According to BBC reporting on the heatwave, new all-time temperature records were set at 56 of the 109 longest-standing weather stations across the UK. The Met Office has also documented how temperatures reaching 40.3°C at Coningsby, Lincolnshire caused rail services to be…
A pattern familiar to many wealth managers is surfacing in the client adviser handover feelings that Emma Boardwell, founder of Emotional Finance, addresses in her advice column: a client who appears satisfied with every annual explanation, yet returns the following year with the identical challenge. The case in question involves a client who regularly compares his current personal pension against a legacy workplace scheme, questioning why the managed plan appears to underperform the one left behind. The Performance Comparison That Keeps Returning At each review, the client places the two performance charts side by side. The adviser, who inherited the…
Chesnara’s HSBC Life acquisition, completed in January 2026, has reshaped the group’s balance sheet in ways that merit careful scrutiny from income-seeking investors and those with legacy life-assurance holdings. The insurer’s half-year results for the six months ended 30 June 2026 show group assets under administration (AuA) rising by 38% to £21bn, a step-change in scale driven almost entirely by that single deal.What the half-year numbers tell income investors about ChesnaraOperating capital generation (OCG) rose 79% to £96m (HY 2025: £54m), and cash remittances increased 31% to £73m (HY 2025: £56m). For investors who hold Chesnara primarily for its dividend…
Financial wellbeing planning, the discipline that places a client’s relationship with money at the centre of the advisory process, is gaining ground among UK practitioners, and Chris Budd’s work helps explain why that shift matters to anyone managing wealth over the long term.Budd, author of The Four Cornerstones of Financial Wellbeing, argues that traditional financial advice has already passed through one upgrade, the move to cashflow-based financial planning, and is now mid-way through a second. That second upgrade is the formal integration of wellbeing principles into how advisers structure client conversations and construct plans.Why Anxiety Is a Portfolio Risk Advisers…
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