Article by Phil
Here’s a selection of the latest news stories from February:
- St James Place has announced a shake-up of its brand. It will be dropping its Wealth Management moniker in favour of a simplified SJP approach. This is the first re-brand for over 20 years since it changed its name from Rothschild to St James Place. The reason behind dropping Wealth Management is apparently to make the brand more accessible as they previously felt it was too restrictive.
- Figures announced by the government shows a massive rise in the amount of tax raised by changes in the Lifetime Allowance (LTA) for pensions over the last 10 years. In 2010/11 the LTA was reduced from £1.8 million to just over £1million meaning that many more people with the biggest pension pots had to pay more tax. The tax take has risen from £32 million back then to over £340 million in 2019/20. The number of people caught by the tax increased from just under 900 to 8,500 showing that the very richest do in fact end up paying the most tax.
- The FCA has provided more details about unauthorised advertising. In its latest disclosures (7th February) it has listed details of the type of advertising which have come under scrutiny in the last 12 months resulting in adverts being withdrawn. Top of the list is retail investments and retail lending which accounted for 77% of the adverts. Trailing behind are adverts about retail banking 11%, pensions 6% and then asset management – only 1%. This is quite enlightening when it comes to pensions and the actual numbers of adverts which have cause concern, which is a very small percentage at only 6%.
- According to a global report by BYN Mellon, women are less likely to invest than man. If women invested at the same rate as men then another £3.2 trillion would be invested, half of which would be invested into ESG funds as well. That’s a lot of money.
- City of London Police have received 800,000 reports of fraud in the last 12 months. That is 40% of all recorded crimes in London. In response to these huge numbers, they spend just 2% of their budget tackling fraud and only 110 were actually investigated by the police.
- Over £4.5 billion was withdrawn from cash ISA’s during 2021 which is a record amount.
- According to research by Nerdwallet 37% of interviewees said that they had a very clear plan for their retirement. However, 10% felt that they would never be able to retire and 52% were concerned about their pensions.
