Later life planning is becoming increasingly complex but many customers are still expected to navigate retirement decisions through fragmented conversations around pensions, mortgages, housing wealth, borrowing and care. While people experience later life as one connected journey, the market often approaches it through separate products, sectors and advice pathways.
That is why the Council has launched its new “Navigating the Road to Later Life” initiative, a collaborative industry project aimed at developing a more joined-up and practical roadmap to help customers better understand and navigate later life financial decisions.
As people live longer, retire more flexibly and increasingly draw on multiple forms of wealth across retirement, the traditional product-by-product approach is becoming less reflective of how customers actually experience later life planning.
Customers do not think in product silos. They think about maintaining financial resilience, adapting their home, supporting family, managing changing health needs and funding retirement over time. Yet too often they are left to navigate multiple disconnected conversations without a clear framework to help them understand how these decisions interact.
Decisions around pensions, savings, housing wealth and borrowing are increasingly interconnected, particularly as retirement journeys become more non-linear. The challenge is no longer simply helping customers understand individual products, but helping them navigate how different financial decisions and life events can influence one another over time.
Improving customer outcomes therefore requires a more joined-up and accessible framework that puts customer need ahead of the product silo sitting underneath it.
The roadmap is intended to create a practical and interactive customer journey framework spanning key stages of later life, helping people better understand what considerations, support options and conversations may become relevant at different points in time.
Importantly, the structure is not being built around traditional age bands. Retirement is becoming more complex and far less set in stone, with people moving through different financial, personal and health circumstances at different times. It is about stages, not ages.
The framework is being designed around four broad stages of the later life journey: early planning and foundations, pre-retirement, retirement itself and post-retirement later life. Across these stages, the work will explore themes including pension planning, mortgages and debt, savings resilience, housing suitability, affordability changes, family support and later life care needs, alongside how customers access information, guidance, referrals and regulated advice.
A central principle underpinning the initiative is that later life should not be viewed as a single transaction or product decision, but as an evolving journey involving interconnected considerations over time.
We also want to highlight vulnerability; it can arise at any stage of the journey. That’s why the work the group undertakes will be grounded in the Council’s Safe Steps framework and informed by real customer experience and practical customer journeys.
The project brings together lenders, advisers, networks, trade bodies and building societies from across the market in a collaborative effort to help shape a more practical and customer-focused approach to later life planning and navigation.
Participation is intended to be active and contribution-led, with organisations sharing practical insight, customer experience and sector expertise to help test and refine outputs.
Operationally, the group is meeting every month via virtual sessions, supplemented by regular in-person meetings. The focus is on design, testing and delivery (rather than discussion alone) with progress and recommendations reviewed on an ongoing basis and fed back into the Council’s wider engagement work.
We began work in April with a first in-person meeting to set objectives and scope. A Leaders’ Symposium in Westminster forms part of the wider programme in June, with a further in-person progress meeting scheduled for September. Adviser testing is planned to coincide with the Later Life Lending Summit North in Leeds in November, ahead of a planned 2027 launch of a live interactive roadmap on the Council’s website.
While the central aim is to create a clearer and more joined-up roadmap for later life decision-making, the wider ambition is to help simplify an increasingly complex landscape for customers.
This includes improving awareness and understanding of later life lending and retirement planning options, supporting better signposting and earlier conversations, and helping both consumers and professionals navigate evolving financial, housing and retirement needs more confidently over time.
The initiative is not about promoting specific products. It is about helping create a more connected and customer-focused approach to later life planning that better reflects how people actually experience retirement and later life today.
