For most of the last decade, the UK’s “advice gap” was a problem everybody described and nobody could fill. Millions of people had money decisions to make, could not justify the cost of full advice, and were left with generic guidance that stopped just short of being useful.
That changed on 6 April 2026. Targeted support is now a regulated activity in its own right, and the firms best placed to use it are not independent advisers. They are the pension providers, platforms, banks and investment houses that already hold the customer’s money, their data and their email address.
If you run an independent advice practice, this is not a regulatory footnote. It is a new competitor standing between you and the people who would once have come looking for an adviser.
In plain English, targeted support allows an authorised firm to make ready-made suggestions to groups of consumers who share common characteristics, without carrying out a full individual suitability assessment. A pension provider can identify members of a certain age, with a certain pot size and an unsuitably cautious investment choice, and suggest a course of action designed for people in that position.
It sits between generic guidance (“here is how drawdown works”) and personal advice (“here is what you, specifically, should do”). It is designed to put people in a better position than doing nothing, and the regulator has been clear that it should not simply be a product promotion exercise.
A few features matter for independent firms:
Think about how a typical new client found an independent adviser five years ago. Something prompted a question — a pension statement, a retirement date, an inheritance. They searched, asked a friend, or were referred by an accountant. Somewhere in that process, they arrived on an adviser’s website.
Now picture the same person in 2026. Before they have formed the question, their pension provider has sent them a suggestion. It is reasonably tailored, it arrives in an app they already use, it costs nothing, and it comes from a brand they recognise. For a meaningful share of people, that will be enough. They will act on it and never search for an adviser at all.
That is not necessarily a bad outcome for those consumers. But it does mean the easy, low-complexity end of the market is being intercepted. The people who still reach you will increasingly be the ones for whom a ready-made suggestion was not enough.
That is good news, if your website is ready for them.
Targeted support works by grouping people. Personal advice works by understanding one person. The gap between those two things is exactly where an independent adviser earns their fee, and it shows up in predictable places:
None of these is solved by a nudge in an app. All of them are increasingly what an independent firm’s website needs to talk about.
Most adviser websites were written for a world where the alternative to advice was no help at all. That world has gone. Your site now has to answer a sharper question: “My provider already gave me a suggestion. Why would I pay you?”
Here is how the strongest firms are answering it.
Name the moment someone outgrows a ready-made suggestion. A page headed “When generic suggestions aren’t enough” or “Had a suggestion from your pension provider? Here’s when to get a second opinion” speaks directly to the person who has just received one and feels uneasy. That is a highly qualified visitor.
Explain the difference in plain English. Guidance, targeted support and personal advice are three different things, and almost no consumer knows it. A short, neutral explainer that sets them side by side positions your firm as the one that tells people the truth about their options, including when they do not need you.
Lead with complexity, not with “pensions”. A service list reading “pensions, investments, retirement planning” now describes exactly what a large provider offers through targeted support. A page built around “pension and inheritance tax planning for families with estates above the nil-rate band” or “retirement planning for business owners” describes something a segment-based suggestion cannot do.
Show what personal advice includes. The fact-find, the cashflow model, the household view, the ongoing review. Visitors comparing a free suggestion with a fee need to see what the fee buys. Make it concrete.
Be honest about who you are not for. If someone has a single modest pot and a straightforward situation, a provider’s suggestion may genuinely be right for them. Saying so builds credibility with the people who are a fit, and saves you hours of polite declining.
Targeted support will make millions of people think about their pensions and investments who never did before. Some of them will act on the suggestion and stop there. Others will start asking questions the suggestion cannot answer.
Those people will search. They will type questions into Google, and increasingly into AI assistants, that begin with “I’ve been told I should…” or “Is it worth getting advice if…”. The firms whose websites answer those questions clearly, with substantive pages that can be read and cited, will be the ones that get the call.
That rewards independent firms that publish. A practice with a handful of well-written pages on the specific situations where personal advice matters most can compete directly with a household-name provider for the visitors that matter, because those visitors are looking for depth, not a brand.
Repositioning is easy to discuss and hard to imagine. Seeing it applied to your own firm makes the difference obvious in seconds.
Heer Digital builds independent IFAs a working homepage prototype at no cost and no obligation. It is a real, clickable page that leads with the situations where personal advice matters, built around your actual proposition. You compare it with your current site and decide whether it is worth taking further.
If it is, the build scales to how you work: a fast, low-maintenance site for a practice that rarely publishes, or a WordPress build for firms that want to publish the explainers and situation pages that win visitors in a targeted-support world.
The simple cases are being answered elsewhere now. Your website needs to be the obvious place for everything else.
Contact Heer Digital for a no-cost, no-obligation homepage prototype for your firm.
