The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and The Pensions Regulator (TPR) have stressed the importance of closer regulatory alignment on retirement support reforms, arguing that guided retirement and targeted support should work together as part of a single member journey.

Speaking at the Pensions Management Institute 2026 Annual Conference, FCA director of cross-cutting policy and strategy, Charlotte Clark, said the two regulators were spending "a lot of time" ensuring their respective regulatory regimes were as closely aligned as possible.

Emphasising the need for collaboration, she argued that pension savers are primarily concerned with outcomes rather than whether they are saving in a trust-based or contract-based arrangement.

“If people are saving into a pension or they’re drawing down a pension, they don’t care who the regulator is,” she stated.

“They don’t really care if they’re in a trust-based scheme or a contract-based scheme. They care about their outcomes.

“Ensuring that we are working together to make sure those outcomes are as good as possible and are as high as possible, whether that is the work that we currently do on value for money (VFM), whether it is conversations we are having around investment strategies - all of those ultimately need to improve consumer outcomes.”

Clark highlighted VFM, scale, investment, and retirement support as key areas of joint working between the two regulators.

She revealed that discussions were increasingly turning to retirement adequacy and decumulation policy, including the interaction between the government's proposed guided retirement framework and targeted support.

“We’re starting to have quite a lot of discussions about adequacy,” she explained.

“What does guided retirement look like? How does targeted support fit into that?”

Responding to an audience question on the relationship between the two initiatives, Clark suggested they should be viewed as complementary rather than competing approaches.

“My view is that they're very closely linked,” she said.

“If guided retirement is there to support people who either will not or cannot engage, then the idea is that targeted support should do less work.

“I think, as we're getting into it a bit more, that sense of these two things working together and ensuring that, where possible, the solution for retirement understands that individual as best as possible.

“The more we get into this, the more complicated it becomes.

“I think as policymakers we're hitting that point of saying, ‘OK, now we need to build something authentic around this and understand how we support people and how we articulate our thoughts’.”

TPR director of strategy and communications, Patrick Coyne, echoed the comments, stressing that retirement decision-making remained one of the biggest challenges facing the industry.

Highlighting the complexity of decumulation choices, Coyne claimed that even pension professionals often struggle with retirement income decisions.

“There is a role for those institutional investors. There is a role for those people who are looking at the numbers, who have the right expertise, to help people navigate retirement,” he stated.

The discussion also underlined the growing convergence between the two regulators more broadly.

For example, Clark noted that when she shared the FCA’s latest corporate strategy with TPR ahead of publication, the response was: “Well, this could be ours.”

Coyne agreed, pointing to extensive joint work on VFM reforms and wider changes in the pensions market.

“We have joint working groups on some really important policy areas where we come to consensus before consulting,” he explained.

“In the current change environment, there is a lot to do after a period of quite significant reform. Focusing on helping the industry implement these reforms is absolutely critical.”

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