Background
WPS Advisory have built their business on providing high-quality financial advice through the workplace, helping people to make informed decisions about their finances based on their values, objectives, wants and needs. It seeks to drive financial empowerment through making retirement advice, wider financial advice and financial education more affordable, and accessible to its clients’ employees.
WPS Advisory is Pension Transfer Gold Standard and has in the 10 years since they started interacted with over 100,000 clients resulting in over 35,000 personal recommendations.
The challenge
While WPS Advisory have largely interacted with people who were preparing for retirement, the employers they work with are increasingly seeking a solution to build financial confidence for younger staff.
Employees are a business’ most crucial asset. The relationship between employee well-being and financial health is well-established, as is its wider impact on productivity, satisfaction and retention.
This, in turn, was costing WPS Advisory’s clients - the employers - money, time and resources.
Recognising the impact of the COVID pandemic, the cost of living crisis and the ever-widening advice gap on financial wellness across the workforce, WPS Advisory were looking for a scalable technology-based solution to modernise financial advice, engage employees across different life stages and equip them with the tools and confidence they need to make smart decisions about their money.
The solution
WPS Advisory chose to partner with us to develop LifeStage, an app designed to empower users to make informed financial decisions, based on their circumstances and goals.
Simplifying money management
LifeStage is set up to help employees visualise their money today, tomorrow, and into the future with ease. Drawing on a range of our Open Finance features, the app enables users to understand their income, expenditure, savings, investments, debts and pensions at a glance.
It is designed to put users' financial plans in their pocket, with features embedded to test the resilience of their plan, and crucially, help users spot changes quickly which could send their plan off track.
Third party integrations for seamless service
To ensure accessing LifeStage and WPS Advisory’s services is as intuitive and barrier free as possible, we’ve integrated with three separate partners:
Guiide
Guiide is a pension modelling tool that helps people understand their current financial situation and plan effectively for retirement. With Guiide, LifeStage users can create and maintain a personalised and sustainable income plan. This plan maximises the use of all available resources to secure a comfortable retirement, while minimising the risks of running out of funds, overpaying taxes, or incurring unnecessary charges.
Legado
Legado’s secure Digital Vault enables LifeStage users and WPS Advisory to upload, store and manage important documents into the app, and notify the other party. Through integrating with DocuSign, WPS Advisory can also request and receive signatures, streamlining the document approval process.
SmartSearch
SmartSearch is a leading UK provider of anti-money-laundering (AML) software. Through this integration, WPS Advisory can comply with the latest AML regulations and fulfil its AML, Customer Due Diligence (CDD), and Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance obligations. The integration offers a seamless customer experience, with individual AML checks complete in a matter of seconds.
Each of these integrations has been developed with information security at the forefront – only firms with ISO accreditation receive personally identifiable information and no information moves outside the EEA.
Advice accuracy through the Sharing Centre
LifeStage users are able to share their app data with WPS Advisory so it can ensure IFAs are always advising based on an accurate picture of a users’ financial situation.
From within the Sharing Centre, advisors can see the accounts their assigned users have chosen to share with them, a summary of net worth, assets and account types, income and spending analysis, broken down by month or, importantly for the advisors, by year. This empowers the advisors with unprecedented capability to access detailed account, transaction, and income/spending data for their end users. This development marks a significant step in enhancing the accuracy and quality of the financial advice provided, and identifying vulnerable customers who may require additional support.
By leveraging LifeStage data and our advanced categorisation engine, WPS Advisory can ensure their advice is always based on a comprehensive and accurate picture of each user's financial situation. This level of insight allows financial advisors to understand how users manage their money and determine what support they might need, thereby helping WPS Advisory comply with Consumer Duty regulations and improve financial outcomes for their users.
Looking ahead
WPS Advisory is poised to roll out LifeStage more broadly in 2025, and is already working on expanding the platform’s capabilities, to cover:
Personal legal services
Private client accountancy services
Long-term care support - helping individuals explore their options when it comes to finding care for a loved one
General insurance
State benefit entitlement
Debt management
Our partnership represents a significant step in revolutionising how financial advice is delivered, making it more accessible and relevant for all employees. We are excited to be working with WPS Advisory to build financial confidence for people at every stage of life.