IFA Talk

In this week's episode, Brandon and Jenny chat with Jordan Sriharan, a Fund Manager at Canada Life Asset Management, to break down what’s ahead for the rest of 2024. 

Jordan talks about all the big stuff, such as how fund managers like himself are adjusting to all the shifting pieces in the markets, changes in UK interest rates and what the upcoming U.S. election could mean for global markets. These are shaping how people are thinking about strategy, risk management, and asset allocation during these unpredictable times. 

Sue and Brandon’s guest on this week’s IFA Talk podcast is Huw Davies, an Investment Manager in the Fixed Income - Absolute Return team, at Jupiter Asset Management. 

In this week’s edition of the podcast, Sue and Brandon are turning their attention to end of life planning. Specifically, about how advisers can help clients to prepare for that eventuality.  Their expert guest is Mark Wood,  Chairman  at Funeral Concierge Service, Everest.

As we look back on the first year of the FCA’s new Consumer Duty, we wanted to find out what it has actually meant for IFA and wealth management businesses in practice.

Questions like what does Consumer Duty look like for advisers now? What’s actually changed on the front line within advice businesses? Were advice firms really ‘already doing it’ as was often suggested? What about technology? How has that adapted? These were all on our mind. 

In this week’s IFA Talk podcast Sue and Jenny are marking the first anniversary of the Consumer Duty by exploring what the new reality has actually been like for financial advisers over this past year. So, is it doing what it says on the tin? 

On today’s episode of IFA Talk, we bring you a mortgage and property special with a focus on the role of building societies in the specialist lender market and the mortgage market in general.

To help us through this discussion, our guest this week is Laura Sneddon, Head of Mortgage Sales and Distribution at Hinckley and Rugby Building Society.

This week on the IFA Talk Podcast, Jenny and Brandon explore a growing theme in the financial services industry: Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A).

More and more businesses are choosing to explore a potential merger or sale of their companies, whether it be due to upcoming retirements or increasing regulatory costs, as a way of ensuring their and their client’s legacies can continue. 

This week’s podcast will be focusing on a hot topic of the moment, AI and how this impacts the investment industry. We are living in a world of rapid technological innovation, where AI is on an exponential upward curve. The asset management industry stands on the edge of a transformation and has potentially a lot to benefit from these advancements. 

Insurance and protection as part of financial planning can often be overlooked or treated as an afterthought when in reality it should form part of the cornerstone of financial planning for many clients. 

So, on this week’s podcast Jenny and Brandon focus on insurance and protection, and in particular policy ownership, with their guest Gregor Sked, Senior Protection Technical Manager at Royal London. 

Has your client retirement proposition evolved following the publication of the FCA's thematic review of retirement income advice? In March, the FCA wrote to the Chief Executives of financial advice firms asking them to review their processes when providing retirement income advice. 

This thematic review has pretty massive implications for the advice profession. The regulator will be looking for clear evidence that advice firms are heeding its messages, making sure that they are delivering robust retirement income advice to clients.

So, what do advisers need to know? What do they need to do? Sue and Brandon’s guest on this week’s IFA Talk podcast is Richard Parkin, Head of Retirement for BNY Investments – someone who is hugely knowledgeable on this subject.

In this conversation, Richard succinctly sums up the five key findings of the review and discusses not only what they mean for advisers but also what advisers could/should be doing in response.   With retirement income advice forming such an important part of the advice process, this is a podcast not to be missed.