Karen Ward JP Morgan strategy chief for EMEA has a pointed message for UK savers and their advisers: holding too much in cash is not caution, it is a risk in its own right. Ward, managing director and EMEA chief market strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management, argues that Britain’s deeply entrenched risk aversion is causing measurable financial harm, and that education alone will not be enough to address it.
Her concern is rooted in a specific number. UK households have accumulated more than £1 trillion in savings, with 60% of it sitting in cash. For savers with a time horizon beyond three to five years, Ward’s position is clear: cash beyond a genuine emergency buffer and short-term liquidity need is costing those households real returns. She frames this not as an investment pitch but as an opportunity-cost argument, balancing the familiar warning ‘capital at risk’ with an equally serious one: ‘return at risk’.
The Case for Moving Beyond Cash
The sequencing here matters for anyone building a retirement income plan or managing a self-invested personal pension. Ward is not suggesting savers abandon caution. She is drawing a clear distinction between money needed in the near term, which belongs in cash or cash-like instruments, and money with a longer horizon, which she argues should be working harder. For portfolios in drawdown, that distinction carries real weight: holding years of income in cash while investing the remainder is orthodox planning; holding everything in cash is sequence-of-returns risk in reverse, eroding purchasing power quietly over time.
Only 17% of people currently use a professional financial adviser, Ward notes, while younger savers are turning instead to social media and what she calls ‘finfluencers’, often without the foundational knowledge to evaluate what they are seeing. The industry, she argues, must share responsibility for that gap, communicating in plain language and meeting savers where they are.
Karen Ward JP Morgan Strategy View on Structural Shifts
Beyond the domestic savings debate, Ward raises a broader point relevant to asset allocation. The world, in her view, is moving from a ‘savings glut’ (decades of excess capital chasing US assets) to a ‘savings grab’, as governments and companies across Europe and Asia accelerate spending on defence, energy security and technology deployment. The rest of the world has invested US$26 trillion more in the US than the US has invested elsewhere; Ward believes that balance is now shifting. European assets and sectors beyond technology, she argues, represent an opportunity the market has not yet fully priced.
On the policy side, Ward sees two parallel tracks. The ‘education train’ (improving financial literacy through schools and targeted advice) is the ideal route, but she acknowledges it is slow. Decades of financial literacy initiatives, she says, have not meaningfully moved the dial. The faster mechanism is automatic: schemes such as auto-enrolment that reduce the burden on the individual. The Financial Conduct Authority has long emphasised the advice gap as a structural problem, and Ward’s framing suggests both tracks must run simultaneously.
Sweden offers Ward’s preferred model. Equity investment policies dating to the 1990s created a virtuous cycle in which knowledge passed between generations, and savers can now view their pension contributions alongside state provision on a single dashboard, a practical tool that the UK has yet to replicate at scale. Pensionsmyndigheten, Sweden’s pensions authority, administers that consolidated system, and Ward points to its transparency as precisely the kind of targeted support that can close the behavioural gap without requiring every saver to become financially literate from scratch.
The auto-enrolment minimum, she is careful to add, is a floor rather than a plan: advisers still need to make clear that it is a starting point, not a complete solution.
