22 April 2026
The centralised retirement proposition was built for consistency. The question is whether it's built for precision.
When Pension Freedoms arrived in 2015, the centralised retirement proposition (“CRP”) was the right response to a genuine challenge: how do you help clients navigate flexible drawdown consistently, responsibly, and in a way that scales across a firm? For most firms, it still forms a solid foundation.
But the Financial Conduct Authority’s TR24/1 thematic review exposed a pattern worth reflecting on. Withdrawal strategies being applied generically. Risk profiling tools designed for accumulation being used for decumulation clients without adjustment, even though both attitude to risk and capacity for loss shift materially at retirement. Clients naturally become more cautious as they transition from building wealth to drawing it down. Their portfolios simultaneously become less able to absorb losses without lasting damage to their income. A framework that doesn't account for those shifts is leaving something on the table.
Why the current environment sharpens this
The problem with a generic CRP isn't new. What's changed is the current investment environment.
Geopolitical uncertainty, persistent inflation risk, interest rate volatility, and equity valuations at historical highs all contribute to a range of plausible market outcomes that is materially wider than advisers have had to navigate for most of the past two decades.
For accumulation clients, time absorbs that uncertainty. For a client in drawdown, a significant fall in the early years of retirement, combined with ongoing withdrawals, can permanently impair a portfolio's ability to recover. That's sequencing risk. And it's the scenario a well-constructed CRP, with the right tools within it, should be stress-tested against.
The personalisation opportunity
Most firms with a CRP in place are already doing the right things. Frameworks in place, cashflow modelling in use, sequencing risk on the agenda. The foundations are solid.
The opportunity, and it genuinely is an opportunity rather than a criticism, is in the degree of tailoring within that framework.
A client drawing a fixed monthly income from their portfolio has subtly different requirements to one still a decade from retirement. Both might sit within the same risk profile. Both might be well served by the same core model portfolio. But the shape of the portfolio around that core, the tools used to manage sequence risk, the degree of defined structure within the medium-term bucket, can be meaningfully different for each.
That level of granularity is where good retirement advice becomes great retirement advice. Not a wholesale redesign of the proposition, but a sharper set of tools available within it.
Where structured products change the equation
This is where defined-outcome investments become directly relevant to CRP design, not as a replacement for existing holdings, but as a complement to them.
A model portfolio or DFM mandate provides diversified market exposure. That remains the core. But for clients in the early and most vulnerable years of drawdown, there is a specific problem that broad market exposure alone doesn't solve: the uncertainty of outcomes over a defined, critical window.
Stagger a series of autocall maturities across the early retirement years, three, four, five years out, and you create a ladder of defined liquidity events. Known timelines, known conditional returns, a known barrier at which capital risk begins. As each plan matures, the proceeds can meet income requirements without forcing sales from an equity portfolio at an inopportune moment. For defensive and step-down structures, the bar for a positive outcome reduces at each observation date, meaning a defined return remains achievable even through periods of sustained market weakness.
The model portfolio provides the core. The structured sleeve adds precision around the downside. Together, they offer something neither delivers alone.
From good to great
The best retirement propositions aren't static. They evolve as markets change, as clients move through different stages of retirement, and as new tools become available to shape outcomes more precisely.
If you'd like to explore how defined-outcome investments could complement your existing proposition, for the right clients, in the right context, I'd welcome the conversation. Please get in touch on 020 3100 8157 or joe.simpson@wcgplc.co.uk.
Joe Simpson
Director, Investment Management
Structured products are capital-at-risk investments and are not suitable for every client. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. This article is for professional advisers only and does not constitute advice.
The value of any investment can go down as well as up, and you may get back less than you invest. Walker Crips Investment Management Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN: 226344).
Important Note
No news or research content is a recommendation to deal. It is important to remember that the value of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up, so you could get back less than you invest. If you have any doubts about the suitability of any investment for your circumstances, you should contact your financial advisor.
The value of investments can fall as well as rise. Investors may get back less than invested. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.
The value of investments can fall as well as rise. Investors may get back less than invested.
