Retirement
Why retirement planning is becoming one of advice’s biggest growth opportunities
In August’s Irish Broker Magazine, Alan McCarthy discusses how retirement is no longer just a pensions conversation.
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The latest PwC Asset and Wealth Management Revolution report highlights retirement as one of the biggest growth opportunities for Europe’s asset and wealth management sector. Anyone working in the retirement industry will recognise this shift. Ireland is quickly becoming a million-retiree society with the number of people aged 65 and over expected to reach the milestone by 2030. People are living longer, spending more years in retirement, and facing increasingly complex decisions about how they want those years to look. Retirement is no longer just a pensions conversation. It’s becoming one of the defining financial and societal challenges of our time.
While much of this growth is often discussed through an asset management lens, the bigger opportunity sits closer to the customer. It lies in helping more people turn long-term saving into purposeful retirement planning.
PwC argues that the next phase of growth will come from broadening participation in long-term investing. On paper, the opportunity looks obvious. More than €10 trillion sits in European bank deposits, while only 18% of Europeans invest in equities, compared with 55% in the US. Those numbers raise an interesting question. If people are already putting money aside, why aren’t more taking the next step towards long-term investing? In Ireland, saving is already a well-established behaviour. Central Bank analysis shows Irish households have increased the proportion of income they save over the past two decades, reflecting longer-term trends including more people preparing for retirement and younger households saving towards home ownership. That doesn’t suggest people are disengaged from their financial futures, quite the opposite. Saving and long-term investing aren’t competing behaviours, but they support different decisions. Saving helps people build financial resilience. Long-term investing asks them to commit some of that money to a goal that’s years, sometimes decades, away. At some point, the question changes from “How much have I put aside?” to “Will it support the second life I want?” That’s the point where saving becomes retirement planning, and where advice will make the biggest difference.
Unlocking the participation opportunity
The report also points to an important implication. If participation is the opportunity, then stronger customer engagement will be one of the ways the industry unlocks it. The question is: what does meaningful engagement look like when it comes to retirement planning? At Standard Life, that’s exactly what we’ve been exploring through almost two decades of our Voice of the Retiree research, a programme that connects us with over 5,000 adults across Ireland each year. In our recent Bringing retirement into focus report, we look at what helps people prepare for retirement today, and what’s getting in the way. Despite retirement moving higher up the national agenda, fewer than one in three people have a retirement plan, while 46% believe retirement will simply happen when they stop working. The findings challenge a common assumption.
The biggest barriers aren’t always a lack of financial information; they’re often behavioural.
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People increasingly know financial planning matters. Improving retirement readiness starts with changing how people think about retirement. When retirement becomes more than a financial event, when people can picture the life they’re planning for, and plan holistically, they’re more likely to engage with the decisions that support it. That’s why, at Standard Life, we believe that meaningful engagement starts by taking this broader view of retirement planning.
Our Voice of the Retiree research continues to validate this belief. By listening to people already living or preparing to live retirement, we’ve gained a deeper understanding of the realities of this life stage today – what surprises people, what they wish they’d planned for sooner and what contributes most to a fulfilling retirement.
Financial readiness remains fundamental, but retirement planning today is also shaped by mindset and social readiness. Understanding and supporting what people are retiring to can be just as important as understanding what they’re retiring with. That’s the thinking behind our retirement readiness framework. Rather than viewing retirement solely through the lens of pension values, it encourages a broader understanding of what helps people feel genuinely ready for later life. When those elements come together, retirement planning becomes more relevant, personal, and ultimately, more actionable.
A different starting point for retirement planning.
Second Life is our ambition to reframe how people think about and engage with getting ready for retirement. Rather than beginning with products, it starts with people.
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One of the ways we bring this thinking to life is our Second Life platform where we share tools like the Second Life Questionnaire and work with advisers to run Second Life events, connecting clients with our panel of experts. This year we’re sharing Second Life with more people through partnerships like The 50 Plus Show, where Brian Mooney, our End of Career Guidance Counsellor, is one of the keynote speakers. Brian encourages people to broaden the retirement planning conversation, prompting questions like “What will give your days structure?” and “How will your relationships change?”. People often arrive to the Standard Life stand wanting to know whether they’ve saved enough. Yet the conversation often quickly expands into questions around purpose, identity, relationships and how they’d like to spend their time. We meet people adjusting to unexpected retirement following illness, redundancy, or caring obligations. We meet others who are embracing a different second life, launching businesses they’ve always dreamed about, volunteering in their communities, taking up new hobbies or finally pursuing ambitions they’ve put on hold for years.
The next opportunity for advisers
The future growth of retirement planning will not be driven by products alone. It will be driven by getting more people to engage earlier, more meaningfully and more confidently with their future. For advisers, this creates an opportunity that goes beyond helping clients invest more. It’s an opportunity to build deeper, longer-term relationships by helping clients navigate one of the most significant life transitions they’ll make. By connecting financial decisions with the life people hope to live, advisers can create conversations that are not only more meaningful for clients, but more valuable for the long-term relationship. In a million-retiree society this may be the profession’s greatest opportunity.
For more information on how Second Life can strengthen your client conversations speak to your Business Manager.
Sources
- Asset and Wealth Management Revolution – Europe, PwC.
- The evolution of household savings: determinants and implications (2025) – Central Bank of Ireland
- Bringing retirement into focus 2025, Standard Life.
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