Our philosophy at Guiide has and will always be to provide our site completely free to everyone. In the absence of any Government support to do this, we meet our costs by licensing bespoke versions of our model to various entities.
In order to keep the site free and to enable us to release further developments at no cost, we also plan to partner on a self-invested pension product with Pathlines called GuiidePath. This is integrated into the journey plans users build on our site. It is just an option, Guiide can still be used for free for those who don’t choose it. GuiidePath is intended for those users who do not wish to manage all aspects of drawdown themselves, or take and pay for advice.
Guiide will have a commercial interest in the success of this product. Both this licensing and any product income will allow us to make further developments on the site, such as couples planning whilst keeping it completely free to use for everyone.
In order to partner in the product, we have to be authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). We are working through this process now.
Due to this we need to make a number of updates to the site. These are referred to below and we will be making the updates to the site very soon.
Health Questions
We will remove the health questions and use average health for life expectancy calculations. We do not expect this to materially impact users.
Life Expectancy projections
To reduce risk to users who live for longer than predicted we must change the life page calculations to use a default life expectancy choice. This will be the age that 25% of people will be expected to live to.
The “live longer” test on the test page will be retained. Again, we do not expect this change to materially impact user experience.
Annuity (Guaranteed income) calculations
If annuity modelling is provided on the free consumer site we would need to consider all possible outcomes in our modelling. We cannot feasibly undertake all the calculations and analysis needed to do this, so we need to remove all annuity calculations from the modeller.
We will still make clear that an annuity is an alternative option and will provide information on where to find further help and regulated advice for users who wish to consider annuities.
The ability to model annuity and drawdown income together is a feature which is valued by a proportion of users and we believe is unique within any online free tool. Annuities once purchased, can still be modelled within Guiide by adding the annuity income into other income in a user’s plan.
Live pot feeds into calculations
Under the FCA’s current rules, if live pot values are used, the calculations must be performed under certain regulatory parameters. Undertaking those calculations would greatly reduce the ease and functionality of our site. This only applies to live values imported automatically. Manually entered values are not affected, even if the exact same value is input.
Simplicity and ease of understanding is a common theme of feedback. We do not wish to lose this.
Therefore, we will remove all connections to live pot feeds. Going forward users will need to manually type pot values into Guiide to update their plan.
We apologise if this impacts some users’ future experience.
We hope to re-instate live pot values in the future if FCA rule changes permit.
Growth rates and general site understanding
Growth rates are a key element of our calculations and cannot be removed. We also want to ensure users retain the flexibility of being able to choose growth rates themselves if they are comfortable.
Our large number of reviews give simplicity and ease of understanding as common elements of feedback.
However to meet our regulatory obligations we need to be sure users understand the consequences of making user selected rates growth rates. We also want to make sure users understand the modelling we provide along with the results and outputs.
We will therefore shortly be contacting all of our users asking that they complete an on-line survey to help us gain insight on user’s understanding. If we can ensure users’ understand the help we provide full this will allow us to continue to provide the site in its current form.
If you have any question at all about the changes above, please contact us at contact@guiide.co.uk.
