Glossary · UK
What is Targeted Support?
A new lighter-touch category of pension and investment help, sitting between full regulated financial advice and generic guidance, that firms can give without a full advice suitability process.
Full Definition
Targeted support is a new tier of consumer help created by the FCA's Advice Guidance Boundary Review, sitting between fully regulated, individually tailored financial advice (which carries stricter suitability and liability requirements and is often too expensive for firms to offer to everyone) and purely generic guidance (which cannot recommend anything specific to an individual). Under targeted support, firms — including pension providers and platforms — can suggest a course of action to a customer based on limited information, such as their age band and broad circumstances, without carrying out the full fact-find and suitability assessment required for regulated advice. The aim is to close the widely documented 'advice gap', where many people with pensions and savings get no help at all because full advice is too costly or seen as unnecessary for smaller pots, by allowing firms to nudge people towards sensible actions — such as consolidating small pension pots or considering a guided retirement pathway — at lower cost and with proportionate consumer protections.