As regulatory costs and client expectations increase following the implementation of Consumer Duty, many business leaders are feeling squeezed. Fortunately, decades of behavioural science insights coupled with the scalability of AI provide the ideal tools to help advisers improve client outcomes while creating more time to develop the business. This session is designed to help the leaders of advice businesses make use of these tools by moving beyond theory to focus on practical implementation strategies.

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

• Fulfilling Consumer Duty: Learn how to embed behavioural nudges into your advice process to demonstrably improve and evidence positive client outcomes.
• Coaching Better Decisions: Discover practical techniques to help clients navigate emotional markets, avoid common cognitive biases, and stay committed to their financial plans.
• Driving Commercial Growth: Understand how a behaviourally informed client experience increases retention, generates stronger referrals, and ultimately builds a more resilient advisory business.
  

The first index fund was launched 55 years ago by Wells Fargo. While the early days of index investing offered relatively simple, “vanilla” solutions, the past 30+ years have seen a significant expansion in both investment options and vehicles.

Dan Caps, MPS Index Lead Manager at Evelyn Partners, will guide you through this evolution, address three common misconceptions around index investing, and explore the diverse ways investors can put their capital to work today.

Learning objectives:

1. Understanding the evolution and role of index investing

By the end of the session, participants will be able to summarise at least three key milestones in the development of index investing and explain how these strategies have grown to surpass active management in assets under management by 2023.

2. Challenging misconceptions about index investing

By the end of the session, participants will be able to identify and critically assess three common misconceptions about index investing (e.g. limited asset classes, static allocation, market-cap constraints) and provide at least one counterexample for each.

3. Applying diversification principles in an index portfolio

By the end of the session, participants will be able to describe how a diversified index portfolio is constructed across at least four asset classes or regions and explain how diversification impacts portfolio risk and return

Market volatility is inevitable, but client reactions don't have to be.

Drawing on Morningstars behavioural science and adviser research, this session explores how advisers can help clients navigate uncertainty, avoid emotional decision-making, and stay focused on their long-term goals.

Natalie Tysoe will examine the behavioural biases that drive investor mistakes during market downturns, share practical coaching techniques used by leading advisers, and demonstrate how effective communication can turn periods of volatility into opportunities to strengthen client relationships and reinforce financial plans.

Learning outcomes:

• Understand how behavioural biases influence investor decision-making during volatile markets.

• Learn practical strategies to prepare, reassure and coach clients through market uncertainty.

• Explore how disciplined investing and rebalancing can help clients benefit from volatility rather than fear it.

Markets are being shaped by shifting economic conditions, geopolitical uncertainty, changing market leadership and significant differences in valuations across regions. This presentation explores how active multi-asset investing can help navigate these conditions by looking beyond benchmark weightings and market headlines. We will consider how dynamic asset allocation, security selection and diversification can help identify opportunities and build portfolios designed to respond as markets evolve.

Learning outcomes

• Identify concentration and valuation risks as market leadership changes.

• Explain how active investors adapt asset allocation and security selection.

• Assess how flexible multi-asset portfolios respond to changing market conditions.

Recent regulatory changes, alongside evolving tax rules around pensions and Inheritance Tax, have brought renewed attention to how retirement income is planned and delivered. At the same time, many clients are finding that their retirement needs are becoming more personal and more complex — requiring solutions that go beyond traditional, one size fits all approaches. In this session, David Wilson and Matt Green will discuss the core challenges of decumulation, the regulatory backdrop and how a fully personalised retirement investment strategy can support clearer, more confident outcomes.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• Better understand the outcome of the FCA’s Thematic Review of Retirement Income Advice

• List the different decumulation risks for clients

• Outline the benefits of a fully personalised retirement investment strategy

AI is often discussed as a monolith. Either service providers, datacentre operators, frontier model developers, and chipmakers all make money and the buildout continues apace, or they don't and the buildout slows. For bottom-up stockpickers, this framing ignores the medley of partnerships and negotiations which define competitive strategy in the space. A customer in one area may be a supplier in another and a rival in a third. Picking stocks within AI is not the same as simply betting on AI. In this presentation, we unpack the dynamics at play within the broader ecosystem, and a range of scenarios that could affect the individual players in different ways. In doing so, we'll discuss where we have found opportunities, whether it be the underappreciated beneficiaries and enablers of AI, or businesses that are largely agnostic to the buildout altogether.

Learning objectives:

• Understand the key players across the AI value chain and how they relate to one another.
• Assess how different scenarios could affect those key players in the AI chain.
• Identify companies that may be underappreciated beneficiaries, unnecessarily overlooked, or largely agnostic to AI and why that can make for a compelling investment case.