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Hargreaves Lansdown hits landmark 2m clients
Investment platform and SIPP provider Hargreaves Lansdown has notched up its milestone 2 millionth client and has also seen record assets under management, according to its 2025 Annual Report.
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Failed SIPP firm clients updated ahead of legal judgment
Clients of failed SIPP provider Hartley Pensions Limited - who have had funds ring-fenced - have been given an update from joint administrators UHY Hacker Young ahead of a legal judgment expected in late October.
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JPMorgan to replace Nutmeg with new investment platform
JPMorgan is to launch a retail wealth management and investment business with its own DIY investment platform next month.
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5 year gap between dream retirement age and expectation
While people dream about retiring at 62 they do not expect to be able to retire until they hit 67, according to new research.
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Sales of escalating annuities surge
Sales of escalating Guaranteed Income for Life annuities that have some inflation protection, accounted for a fifth of all sales in 2024/25 and have increased by 17% year-on-year.
Pensions analyst calls for creation of annuities auction house
Pensions analyst Michael Johnson urged Dr Altmann to continue with the bold reforms that her predecessor Steve Webb began.
He also called for a not-for-profit national annuities auction house to automate the process of shopping around. He said this would add to pricing tension and transparency.
Mr Johnson has come up with 16 suggestions that focus on "encouraging the rebirth of a savings culture" and said these are all "at least cost-neutral" for the Treasury.
He said they would "lead to both greater independence and prosperity for individuals in their retirement and greater sustained economic growth for the whole nation".
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His recommendations include:
• Simplify the regulatory framework.
• Establish a grand vision for saving. Suggestion: to encourage a broad-based savings culture, with the aim of raising the nation's household savings ratio from 5.9% (Q4 2014) to the 1980's average of 13%, say.
• Include ISAs in the auto-enrolment legislation, branded the Workplace ISA.
• Replace today's tax relief framework for pensions contributions with a simple 50p per £1 saved, up to an annual allowance of £8,000, paid irrespective of taxpaying status. Cap total combined annual ISA and pensions contributions at £30,000 and scrap the lifetime allowance.
• Rapidly increase today's private pension age of 55 (scheduled to rise to 57 in 2028) to 60 in 2024, i.e. by a year every two years, commencing in 2016.
• Monitor the roll-out of auto-enrolment into workplace pensions, particularly SMEs' opt-out rates.
• Rapidly sort out the small pots problem. Scrap Pot-Follows-Member in favour of aggregation.
• Establish a few "value for money" benchmarks, then identify the key policy levers that would help deliver them when (i) accumulating and (ii) accessing savings.
• Encourage NEST (and its competitors) to develop a collective drawdown capability to enable retirees to pool their longevity risk.
• Establish a not-for-profit national annuities auction house to automate the process of shopping around, adding to pricing tension and transparency.
• Simplify the tax framework: combine National Insurance Contributions (NICs) and Income Tax into one Earnings Tax.
• Signal that the triple lock indexation of the State Pension (the maximum of earnings, prices and 2.5%) will cease in 2020, to be replaced by CPI.