In targeted support we trust?
In targeted support we trust? There’s everything to play for
July 30, 2026
by Julia Grimes
Content strategist, consultant and writer
Targeted support, the FCA’s new regulated activity, is here.
Now comes the hard part. In the real world, how does it actually help more people make better financial decisions at moments that matter?
That’s what everyone came together to explore at this latest event from Life Moments.
Different financial services firms, different roles, different approaches and different experiences – but all with the common goal of seizing this opportunity.
A question of trust
The major theme was trust, of course – because we’re dealing with people’s life savings.
But as the event title – In targeted support we trust? – suggested, it’s about much more than that. Trust is woven through every aspect of targeted support.
People need to trust firms to look after their money and help them make good decisions. They need confidence that the support they’re getting is genuinely for them – not just a sales pitch – and that it’s honest, clear and understandable.
Firms need clear boundaries, workable guardrails and enough room to innovate and help people in meaningful ways.
And then there’s the bigger question. Do we trust that targeted support can genuinely help plug the gap, reaching people who aren’t getting help today and giving them the support they need to move forward?
Building trust with consumers
“People trust us in financial services to keep their money. But they don’t trust us with decisions.”
That’s how Ben Leonard from Life Moments summed up the consumer perspective in his opening words – and it gets to the heart of the challenge right away. Yes, people keep their money with financial services firms. They don’t really have much choice. But when it comes to making financial decisions? Well, there are options. And you can always turn to ChatGPT… or a finfluencer.
So, if targeted support is going to help people make better decisions, then first it has to win their trust.
Meet people where they are
Picking up this thread, Liz Waldron, Head of Product & Client Experience at Vanguard | UK & Europe, showed us how her firm’s approach wasn’t to start with the regulation. It was to identify a real client problem and take it from there.
Liz stressed the need to meet people where they actually are, not where you assume they are, and to test relentlessly so you know exactly where they’re starting from. She pointed to the industry’s tendency to assume financial competence – and to design as if everyone has it.
She also emphasised empathy, describing people who feel embarrassed they don’t know enough, anxious they’ve left it too late or scared of making the wrong decisions.
ChatGPT came up again here, because if people want a free, accessible and non-judgemental space, that’s where they’re increasingly heading. Not ideal, given the risk of misinformation, but as Liz pointed out, it shows that people do want help.
The art of ‘just right’
While she wasn’t officially on the agenda, Goldilocks was ever-present across the event. As John Jones, Head of Strategy & Propositions at Barclays Wealth Management put it, she’s basically the spirit icon for targeted support. Because whether it’s collecting data, asking questions, writing risk warnings or giving support, getting the balance ‘just right’ is the name of the game. And most of the speakers were wrestling with exactly this: build trust, engage people, give them something meaningful but don’t make it onerous, don’t get too personalised, and definitely don’t stray into advice.
Greg Davies, Head of Behavioural Finance at Oxford Risk, challenged the digital tendency to treat every question as friction. He argued that targeted support will only succeed if it’s genuinely targeted and that the real risk isn’t asking too many questions, it’s asking too few of the ones that matter. Some questions are evidence of care. They build trust, because they help answer the question: how do you know this is right for someone like me?
Andrew Storey, Group Innovation Director at EV - Financial Solutions, was grappling with questions too. While many firms are starting simple with targeted support, he was straight in at the deep end: looking at retirement, when you’ve got no choice but to make a choice. And that choice is complicated, and it comes with long-lasting consequences.
As he showed, what someone ‘should’ do at retirement depends on a long list of things: pot size, other income, health, spending needs, risk appetite etc. But most pension providers only know two things about their customers: retirement age and pot size. Ask too few questions and the help is generic. Ask too many and you’re over the line into advice.
Then there’s another constraint. Targeted support has to be reactive. You can’t just reach out and start asking questions. People have to come to you. So there are real obstacles but Andrew concluded that targeted support can be part of the story – just not the whole story. It sits within the wider ecosystem of retirement support.
Sophie Legrand-Green, Head of Policy at TISA UK, also raised the tension that PECR is causing, making it harder for firms to deliver the timely nudges and event-driven prompts to support people at the point they need it most. While the regulatory framework might be there, she acknowledged that firms need a clearer FCA perimeter to help them deliver targeted support confidently.
Finding the right words
Eve McGrady, Head of Consumer Duty at Fairer Finance, zoomed in on communication, demonstrating the essential role clear information and easy-to-understand language have in creating trusted journeys.
There was consensus on this across the speakers, along with candid admission that language is proving trickier than expected for many. Ironically, given Consumer Duty’s focus on language that people can actually understand, it’s the term ‘targeted support’ that’s causing some of the biggest headaches.
What does it actually mean, how is it different to ‘guidance’ or ‘advice’, and how do you explain words that mean one thing in regulation and another in everyday life?
The scope for confusion, crossed wires or ending up with something you didn’t expect is huge.
Barclays’ John Jones raised the confusion his team had witnessed over the name targeted support but also acknowledged that trying to minimise its use caused confusion too. And Joshua Lambert, Vanguard | UK & Europe’s product lead, shared how his team had assumed that tech would cause the most challenges for people whereas actually, it was the language.
From principles to practice
After a morning spent grappling with challenges, it was satisfying to see Life Moments’ Prashanthi Balachander translate so much of this complexity into a coherent – and refreshingly simple – design for a practical, targeted support journey. She showed how she’d taken nine principles and distilled them into three: create a personalised experience, deliver education before action, and enable control and choice through design.
She then brought these principles to life, walking us through the building blocks of the journey: the trigger, the questions, the common characteristics, the verification step and the ‘play’ moment, where interactive tools and calculators can help people understand their options.
It was a glimpse of all the pieces coming together.
So, in targeted support we trust?
It’s still early days. There’s trust to earn, big obstacles to overcome and plenty of difficult questions to answer. But if the collaborative spirit, creativity and determination on display at this event are anything to go by, there’s everything to play for.
