eValue strategy director Bruce Moss has told a London conference that assessing client risk will be more important in the post-Budget world where annuities are no longer necessary.
Mr Moss, speaking at eValue's Better Outcomes Conference on wealth management in London today, said that assessing client risk would come to the fore next year when thousands of people had to consider alternatives to annuities.
He said investment volatility - often considered as a critical factor - was rarely what clients viewed as most important when they were talking about risk and advisers had to take this on board when advising clients. To most clients risk meant something else.
For clients, he said, risk often meant worrying whether they would have enough money to last them during their retirement, whether they could pay school fees and what impact inflation would have on their savings.
He said: "It is important we help customers understand the risks in relation to their investments."
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He said in some cases clients needed to take less risk but in some cases more. As an example he said someone at age 30 could be encouraged to take more investment risk as they could afford to ride out volatility. Sometimes this wasn't factored in to the investment advice process, he said.
Mr Moss said a big "crunch point" was coming for the industry in 11 months time when the freedom to take an alternative to an annuity purchase would mean consumers having a "big pot of money" and major decisions about where to invest it.
He predicted that many clients would opt to seek an annuity alternative and would need good advice when it came to the investment decisions that were subsequently needed. Assessing risk would then become much more important for clients at or near retirement.
He said annuities were not dead, however, and he predicted the annuity sector would fight back with alternatives such as structured products, variable annuities, fixed term annuities, longevity insurance and so on but that many people would opt as early as age 55 to move their pension to annuity alternatives.
On CIPs he said that they have a long term future and could well be part of a post-Budget annuity alternative.
He said: "CIPs have a long term future. They are perfectly good for many advice purposes and in many cases very good solutions." He agreed, however, with the FCA's Rory Percival, who spoke earlier at the conference, that a "one size fits all approach" on CIPS was not a good one.
Colleague Phil Morse said a survey of 4,000 advisers found that 95 % of advisers were now using a CIP and 30% were using risk-rated and risk-mapped funds.