2025 Programme
Information and timings below are currently provisional and subject to change
Browse the exhibition with coffee and pastry in hand.
A warm welcome and look at the day ahead.
A significant challenge exists in the general public's understanding and confidence regarding financial matters. This widespread lack of financial literacy has profound implications for individuals and the financial services sector.
Our opening panel will explore the critical role that financial advisers play in empowering individuals to make sound financial decisions, foster greater engagement with financial services, and highlight practical initiatives and innovative approaches to cultivate more informed consumers.
In today’s market, resisting the herd mentality is both crucial and challenging. This presentation draws parallels between the Monty Hall Problem and investor psychology, highlighting how counterintuitive decision-making can lead to better outcomes. We’ll explore the extreme market sentiment and positioning currently concentrated in sectors like US tech and speculative assets, and the heightened risks of following consensus at this stage. Finally, we’ll uncover opportunities beyond the mainstream, demonstrating how investors who can overcome FOMO and avoid YOLO investing can find real value in overlooked areas.
Learning Objectives:
- Explain why obvious solutions are not necessarily the best ones.
- Understand the necessity of a differentiated view in markets to achieve outperformance.
- Recognise the importance of diversification in an increasingly concentrated market
Refresh and re-caffeinate whilst you meet and catch up on the latest news and updates from our exhibitors.
At a time when more and more investors are being led by the nose into passive portfolios that offer cheaper fees in return for hidden risks, we think quality active management provides a better product with more reliable results.
While it costs slightly more today, we think that a modest active fee for tried and tested management is a small price to pay for a range of benefits that become clear over longer timeframes. Most crucial are better risk management and more diverse portfolios. With three-quarters of the MSCI World Index invested in the US and fully 24% in just nine stocks – all in the same industry, all in the same nation – we believe that avoiding these risks is highly underrated.
Yet active multi-asset managers’ ability to target specific results, rather than simply take what the market gives you, is one of active management’s greatest strengths. It can also make for easier client journeys. Loss aversion is real: big swings in portfolio values rattle most investors and often leads to them insisting on rash decisions at the wrong times.
In a time when markets have roared ahead, driven by an ever-smaller group of companies, getting what the market serves up has been considered a feature of passive investing. However, that opinion may change sharply when markets start falling.
Put simply, we think active multi-asset portfolios offer better value than their passive counterparts.
By the end of this session you will be able to explain, state, or describe:
- State why active management is needed to manage risk
- Describe the heightened risks caused by the outperformance of the “Magnificent 7” (US technology stocks) over 2023/4
- Explain the impacts of the Trump presidency on global markets
Within the multi-asset investment solution space, there is more choice in the marketplace than there has ever been. Alongside this, client needs and preferences are continually diverging and evolving. It’s important to understand what those investment options are and find the optimal solution for clients.
- To understand how different multi-asset portfolio solutions can cater for clients’ different investment objectives
- To understand the market outlook for 2025 and implications for portfolio positioning
- To identify the key features of Fully Diversified, Low Cost and MPS solutions
Intergenerational imperatives:
- The family imperatives
- The wealth management imperatives
- The taxation imperatives
- The adviser business value imperative
The intergenerational bond in practice: Its time has come
- Tax effective Accumulation
- Tax effective Decumulation
- Tax effective Wealth transfer
Learning Objectives:
- To understand and use in financial planning strategy
- The importance of taking an intergenerational approach through all stages of financial planning
- The current taxation context for intergenerational planning
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The role of an onshore investment bond alone and with trusts to deliver tax effective intergenerational outcomes
Whether it is an entire firm or an adviser’s book of business, there are clear strategies to maximise value.
This session will explore the key elements that contribute to a valuable advice business with a focus on driving organic revenue growth. We will examine how advisers and advice businesses can refocus to generate sustainable organic growth, identify common barriers from business models to mindset, and share practical insights and technology solutions to overcome them.
Learning objectives:
- Identify the key elements that contribute to building a valuable advice business.
- Analyse common barriers to organic growth, including business model and mindset challenges.
- Evaluate practical strategies and technology solutions that support sustainable organic revenue growth.
As cyber threats grow more sophisticated, financial advisers are increasingly in the firing line—handling sensitive client data, relying on digital platforms, and often working in small firms with limited IT support. This session explores the top cybersecurity risks facing today’s advisers, including AI-powered phishing scams, ransomware-as-a-service, and social engineering tactics that exploit human error.
We’ll break down how these threats are evolving, what regulators like the FCA expect in terms of cyber resilience, and why clients are starting to factor digital security into their trust decisions. Most importantly, we’ll share five practical, low-cost steps that every advice firm can take immediately to strengthen their defences.
Join George Cliff, CIO of Clever Investment Management as he discusses the main flaws we have as humans in investment decision-making, but more importantly how the science around process-driven investment methods are the cure to more consistent outcomes.
Discuss highlights and lessons from the morning sessions and connect with exhibitors to discover how they can support you, your business, and your clients.
Amongst the backdrop of the Labour government changes, and ten years since pension freedoms, join Standard Life as they bring to life how people are thinking and feeling about retirement, using their flagship Retirement Voice research to put real clients’ views on retirement front-and-centre.
With the changes to policy afoot and client sentiment shifting, where do the biggest risks lie for your clients?
And what is the Retirement Risk Zone - and why does it matter?
This session will consider the direction of travel for retirement planning and take you through practical examples around where there’s opportunity to re-think retirement for your clients.
The era of product shelf-fill is over. Welcome to the age of product accountability. Consumer Duty doesn’t just ask if your client gets good outcomes – it asks if you helped design, distribute, or oversee the product in a way that ensured those outcomes. That’s a fundamental shift – and it lands squarely of the desks of manufacturers, distributors and co-manufacturers alike. The sessions will explore the implications, risks and liabilities (and how to offset them) alongside the new opportunities that have been created for advice firms as a consequence.
Learning objectives:
- Gain an understanding of the roles and responsibilities for product manufacturers, whether an advisory model portfolio, fund, or bespoke investment solution
- Gain an understanding as to how the shift in focus from the Consumer Duty reshapes the expectations around product manufacturing/co-manufacturing, and the cost of getting it wrong
- Gain an understanding of the potential to share and offset liabilities, with discussion on the FCA expectations on collaboration and clarity of responsibilities
- Learn how investment solutions, designed correctly, can provide additional income opportunities for advice firms
The dynamism of the American economy has seen a decade of extraordinary growth of the US stock market relative to the rest of the world. But does a combination of chaotic government policy, stretched company valuations, and the emergence of a multi polar world order mean that this dominance is about to end? Marcus Brookes, CIO of Quilter Investors, will discuss whether this may be the case and what it could mean for investors.
Learning outcomes:
- US assets have been strong performers over the last decade leading to the narrative of ‘US exceptionalism’.
- The US now dominates the global equity index whilst the US equity market is also increasingly concentrated in its largest stocks.
- A market cap asset allocation leads to a very high exposure to US tech companies and a lack of diversification.
Following on from the Government’s Budget in October 2024, tax changes are driving people to take a much closer look at their financial affairs, especially inheritance tax (IHT) planning. The proposed inclusion of pension pots in IHT calculations and modifications to agricultural and business relief mean that a significantly larger number of people will be subject to inheritance tax. The Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that an additional 10,500 estates with inheritable pension wealth will liable paying IHT for the first time in 2027 to 2028.1
As a consequence, clients are feeling anxious about the legacy they planned to pass onto their beneficiaries. These changes create a financial planning opportunity, but there is also a need to be more creative than previously. Elliot Gee from Octopus Investments, will take a closer look at the changes Chancellor Reeves announced and their impact on estate planning and existing client arrangements. Especially those who own businesses and have pension assets that were previously free from IHT.
Octopus will cover four key IHT planning topics, based on adviser questions received:-
- Gifts and regular gifts from income
- Pension IHT planning
- Trust planning
- Business relief
Learning objectives
1: Articulate the IHT changes impacting clients made at the budget
2: Better understanding of the transitional rules and changes proposed in the budget
3: Identify clients who need to adapt or implement changes to their IHT legacy plans
The recent government proposal on pension funds and inheritance tax has highlighted the importance of expert retirement advice. This session will provide advisers with the tools and techniques needed to ensure that clients receive suitable and appropriate advice that will meet their individual needs. Our panel will explore the key considerations for developing a clear, centralised retirement proposition with investment outcomes that addresses individual risk profiles, client vulnerability, and empowers clients to make informed decisions about their financial future.