The Academy of Life Planning is developing the Independent Retirement Review: a workplace service combining AI-supported pension understanding, lifetime financial modelling and independent human planning. We are inviting accredited Total Wealth Planners to help build and deliver it.
The missing employee benefit
Employers spend billions providing pensions for their employees.
Yet how many employees genuinely understand what they have?
Ask someone about their workplace pension and they may know the name of the provider, perhaps the value of their pension pot, and possibly their expected retirement date.
Ask whether their pension will support the life they actually want, and the conversation becomes more difficult.
What happens if they reduce their hours?
What if their partner retires earlier?
What if caring responsibilities increase?
What if their health changes?
Can they afford to stop working before State Pension age?
These aren’t investment product questions.
They are retirement-planning questions.
And understanding the answers requires more than looking at a pension statement.
It requires understanding the person.
An existing £500 tax exemption offers an opportunity
There is a little-discussed provision in UK tax legislation that could help employers address this problem.
Under Section 308C of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003, employers can provide qualifying pension information or advice to employees, with the first £500 of the benefit exempt from Income Tax in a tax year, subject to the statutory conditions.
Importantly, the legislation includes information connected with:
- The employee’s pension arrangements.
- The use of their pension funds.
HMRC guidance also recognises that relevant pension information can encompass wider financial and tax considerations connected with retirement decisions.
The exemption is not restricted to the employer’s own pension scheme.
This creates an interesting possibility.
Could employers help employees understand their retirement possibilities by funding independent, pension-focused planning as an employee benefit?
We think the answer merits serious investigation.
The Academy is developing a practical service around that opportunity. We are establishing whether the complete proposed package qualifies for the exemption before making any definitive claims about its tax treatment.
Sources: Section 308C ITEPA 2003 and HMRC guidance EIM21803.
Introducing the Independent Retirement Review
The Academy of Life Planning is developing a new service that accredited Total Wealth Planners could deliver to employees through their workplaces.
We call it the Independent Retirement Review.
The objective is straightforward.
Help employees understand their pension arrangements, explore their retirement possibilities and develop the capability to make informed decisions for themselves.
No investment products are sold.
No assets are managed.
No pension transactions are arranged.
No product recommendations are made.
The professional is there to help the person understand their situation, examine factual alternatives and identify the questions that need answering.
Bring me the problem, not the portfolio.
Plan the person before the pension
Imagine an employee aged 60.
They have a defined benefit pension, a defined contribution pension and an expected State Pension.
They are considering reducing their working hours at 62 and retiring completely at 65.
Their partner also works part-time. They have a mortgage, some savings and caring responsibilities for an older relative.
They want more time for family, travel and voluntary work.
A conventional pension illustration might show their accumulated benefits and projected retirement income.
Useful information.
But it does not answer the whole question.
The employee needs to understand how their pensions interact with their household finances, their health, their responsibilities and their aspirations.
That is why our proposed review examines six connected areas:
- Pension position: Existing occupational and personal pensions, benefits, entitlements and options.
- Wider resources: Other savings, property, income sources and liabilities.
- Life circumstances: Partners, dependants, health, caring responsibilities and housing.
- Retirement aspirations: Work, lifestyle, purpose and preferred retirement timing.
- Retirement scenarios: Lifetime income, expenditure, longevity and uncertainty.
- Decision readiness: Understanding, financial activation, unresolved questions and the implications of different possibilities.
All six relate directly to the employee’s ability to understand and use their pension provision.
A pension isn’t an isolated investment account.
It is part of the financial foundation supporting someone’s life.
AI changes the economics of delivering this service
Historically, a comprehensive retirement review required substantial professional time.
Gathering pension statements, extracting benefits, building cash-flow models and preparing reports could take hours before the planner even met the client.
That is changing.
The Academy already has applications capable of doing much of this preparatory work.
Our proposed service integrates three existing tools.
Ask My Pension
Helps employees understand their pension arrangements, examine scheme information and explore retirement questions.
It now includes our Guided Retirement Challenge, designed to help people interrogate the assumptions underlying provider-led retirement defaults.
Navigator
Provides lifetime cash-flow modelling.
Employees can explore different retirement dates, income patterns, expenditure assumptions and financial scenarios.
Rather than being given a single projected outcome, they can examine the consequences of changing their assumptions.
FAM Financial Activation Score
Adds another dimension: the person’s financial activation.
Financial resources alone do not establish whether someone understands their circumstances, feels capable of making decisions or can move forward.
FAM helps make that dimension visible.
Together, these tools provide the foundations for a more comprehensive retirement review.
The Academy is developing an automated workflow to bring their outputs into a structured report.
The Total Wealth Planner then provides the human understanding session, checks the evidence and completes the review.
AI prepares the evidence. The planner brings the human perspective. The employee keeps the capability.
Continuous agency with episodic expertise
This is where the business model becomes particularly interesting.
A retirement review should not become obsolete the moment the employee leaves the meeting.
Circumstances change.
People change jobs, reduce their hours, develop caring responsibilities, inherit money, move home and reconsider their retirement plans.
The traditional response is to propose ongoing professional reviews.
But not every change requires another paid meeting.
What if the employee could maintain their own understanding and revisit their scenarios using intelligent tools?
And what if an experienced professional were available when human expertise would genuinely add value?
That is the model we are developing.
Continuous agency. Episodic expertise.
The initial employer-funded review establishes the foundation.
The employee retains their planning information and can continue using Academy OS tools through its token-purchase arrangements.
The professional remains available when needed.
It is a different relationship between the individual, technology and professional expertise.
Can this become a viable service for independent planners?
We have already completed the first proposition specification and developed a fictional employee case to test the service.
Our initial workflow assessment suggests that automation could reduce active practitioner preparation and delivery time considerably.
We have estimated:
- Around 260 minutes for a predominantly manual process.
- Around 125 minutes with automated preparation.
- A longer-term development target of 90 minutes per completed review, including a 50-minute human meeting.
These are estimates, not observed productivity results. They need testing with practitioners and real case complexity.
We are exploring an illustrative package price of £495, subject to commercial testing and confirmation of the relevant tax treatment.
The important question is whether we can make comprehensive, independent retirement understanding accessible to employees while creating a worthwhile livelihood opportunity for the professionals delivering it.
I believe we can.
But I want the proposition developed with practising Total Wealth Planners, not simply handed to them as a finished product.
An invitation to accredited Total Wealth Planners
This is one of the practical propositions we are developing through the Academy’s Private Members’ Club (PMC).
We are inviting accredited Total Wealth Planners who are interested in workplace retirement planning to help shape the service.
There is real work to do.
We need to:
- Test the employee journey and review methodology.
- Refine the integration of Ask My Pension, Navigator and FAM.
- Develop the automated report-generation process.
- Establish the practical time and cost of delivery.
- Confirm the treatment of the proposed service under the employer-funded pension information exemption.
- Develop the employer proposition, practitioner materials and quality standards.
- Identify opportunities for carefully structured workplace pilots.
This is not a promise of clients, income or immediate commercial opportunities.
It is an invitation to help build and test a practical service that accredited Total Wealth Planners could eventually offer through their own practices.
And it is an example of what the Academy’s professional community is intended to achieve.
Not simply discussing how financial planning should change.
Designing, testing and delivering the alternatives.
A new opportunity to restore human agency
There is a broader principle behind this development.
Employers already recognise pensions as an important part of employee remuneration.
But providing a pension and enabling an employee to understand it are different things.
The first establishes financial rights.
The second helps the person exercise those rights with understanding and confidence.
AI now makes much of the information and modelling work more accessible.
That creates an opportunity for independent professionals to concentrate on the human dimensions of retirement planning.
Not replacing human judgement with artificial intelligence.
Not creating another permanent dependency on professional advice.
Building the individual’s capability while making professional expertise available when it matters.
Your pension is part of your pay. Understanding it should be part of your employee benefits.
And helping people achieve that understanding could become a worthwhile new service for independent financial planners.
Join us in developing the Independent Retirement Review
Are you an accredited Total Wealth Planner interested in developing an independent workplace retirement-planning service?
We are taking this proposition forward through the Academy of Life Planning’s Private Members’ Club.
If you would like to contribute to its design, testing and eventual delivery, I invite you to join us.
Explore the Academy Foundations and Private Members’ Club
Steve Conley
Founder, Academy of Life Planning
Self-directed by default. Supported when it matters.
The line that stayed with me is that most people can name their pension provider but cannot say whether their pension will support the life they actually want. That matches what I have seen — the statement gives a pot size, but it never answers the real questions, like what happens if you cut your hours at 62, or if a partner retires earlier, or if caring responsibilities grow. I also liked the six-area approach, especially putting life circumstances and retirement aspirations alongside the pension position, rather than treating the pension as an isolated account. The £500 exemption point was new to me, and the idea of continuous agency with episodic expertise feels right: most people do not need another paid meeting every time life changes, they need a way to revisit their own scenarios and get human help when a decision actually matters.