Author: Aisha Mahmood

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…

The SJP Business Sale Purchase scheme has processed up to 300 transactions per year, with a combined annual value of around £200 million, giving St. James’s Place partner firms a structured internal route to either expand or exit their practices. For wealth managers assessing their own succession planning, understanding how that mechanism operates in practice matters as much as knowing the headline numbers.A Three-Decade Framework Under Regulatory ScrutinyThe Business Sale and Purchase (BSP) proposition is not a recent invention. According to St. James’s Place, it was originally launched in 1992 and has since evolved over three decades alongside major regulatory…

HMRC tax investigation returns reached £34.70 for every £1 spent across its five key taxpayer directorates last year, according to multinational law firm Pinsent Masons, a 13% increase from £30.80 in the prior year, and a figure that underlines how seriously HM Revenue & Customs is investing in compliance activity.For anyone with significant tax affairs, whether a self-invested personal pension (SIPP) holder drawing down in retirement or a business owner with complex income streams, the direction of travel here is clear: HMRC is deploying more resource into investigations, and that resource is generating an accelerating financial return.Corporation Tax Compliance Driving…

End-of-life financial planning has, for many years, sat in an uncomfortable corner of the adviser-client relationship, avoided by both parties and deferred until circumstances made it unavoidable. That is beginning to change, and the reasons are as much personal as they are regulatory.Bill Villanova, president of Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel, has spent decades helping families navigate the most difficult moments of their lives. In a recent communication to the financial media, he described how younger generations are growing more comfortable planning for the future, and how end-of-life financial planning is evolving into an act of care rather than something…

The FCA wealth manager warnings issued this week, covering fee structures, financial crime controls and artificial intelligence risks, set the tone for a period dominated by regulatory pressure and inheritance tax planning concerns. The regulator’s review, which draws on survey data covering information up to 31 December 2024 according to Money Marketing, scrutinises an industry managing close to £1 trillion in assets and finds it making solid progress while falling short in several governance areas.For investors with SIPP or ISA holdings managed by a wealth firm, the review is a useful reminder that regulatory oversight is active, not passive. Consumer…

HMRC tax receipts 2026 reached £322.7bn in total tax and national insurance contributions between April and July, a £19.1bn increase on the same four-month period a year earlier. For investors managing wealth in drawdown or approaching retirement, the figure is more than a fiscal headline: it arrives alongside a series of legislative changes that advisers say will pull considerably more private wealth into the Treasury’s orbit. What Is Driving the Surge in HMRC Tax Receipts 2026 The rise was largely driven by robust personal and corporate taxation receipts, according to the data from HMRC. Wealth advisers, however, are looking beyond…

The European covered bond market, a €3 trillion asset class with a history stretching back more than two centuries, is attracting renewed attention from fixed-income investors who want yield without stepping meaningfully up the risk curve. Against a backdrop of geopolitical uncertainty, shifting fiscal dynamics and volatile interest-rate expectations, covered bonds present a case that is difficult to dismiss: dual recourse to the issuer and to a legally protected, over-collateralised cover pool, all within a regulatory framework that treats the asset class as highly liquid and explicitly shields it from bail-in. What Makes the European Covered Bond Market Structurally Different…