The M&G Technical Team have won the Professional Paraplanner Best Technical Support for Paraplanners award 8 times in the past 8 years. To find out more about the team and its services, we posed 10 questions to Head of the department Les Cameron.
1. What’s the history and remit of the M&G Wealth technical team?
Technical Support goes back decades from the old Prudential helplines and also Scottish Amicable pension and 2European” helplines. When Pru took over ScotAm in 1997 all the helplines were merged into one team. Support was predominately telephone and email based.
The team in it’s current guise was established to provide deep technical expertise to financial advisers and paraplanners. The team plays a key role in interpreting legislation, offering planning insights, and helping advisers navigate complex financial planning scenarios. We speak at seminars, run our own well regarded and highly popular Techy Thursday CPD webinar programme and have conference calls with advisers and their account managers. On top of that we build and maintain some very highly regarded tax tools. The bedrock of it all is our “Tech Matters” website which is a comprehensive source of everything we have in one place.
We also have a LinkedIn group for advisers and paraplanners where we share things that interest us and we do get the odd question directed to us in there too. Just recently one group member answered another member’s question without us needing to – I think that’s been the highlight of my year so far. Not because we’d nothing to do, I think we popped in an “we agree” , but members of the group helping each other out!
2. Why is it important for M&G to offer this dedicated resource?
M&G’s purpose is to give everyone real confidence to put their money to work. Our focus is on supporting financial advisers, from running our own academy right through to the support my team delivers. It also reflects M&G’s commitment to help close the advice gap and support the profession with practical, real-world guidance.
The team enhances adviser confidence, supports compliance, and ultimately helps deliver better client outcomes.
When it gets technical or complicated we look to give advisers the confidence they need. We know technical support is one of the most valued things by advisers and paraplanners alike and I’m proud to lead the team that helps deliver what I think is up there with the best.
It’s also why we are touring the country with the Professional Paraplanner Technical Insight seminars. We like nothing better than meeting paraplanners face-to-face to help them with the more complex technical aspects of their role and answer any questions they may have.
3. How many technical experts do you have and what specialisms do you have within the team?
Five including me!
If it’s tax and related to mainstream UK financial planning then we’ll cover it
The bulk of our work is in the trusts and IHT world but we also cover most taxes and all things pensions.
4. What does a typical day look like for the team?
A typical day involves:
– Responding to technical queries from advisers and paraplanners
– Conference calls with advisers and paraplanners
– Creating and updating calculators and tools
– Writing articles and guidance for the Technical Hub
– Delivering or creating webinars and CPD sessions
– Monitoring the wires for change affecting the tax world – not everything comes through set piece events like the budget.
5. Roughly how many requests a year do you respond to?
Straight questions and answers is around the 3,000. On top of that we’ve done over 400 conference calls and delivered over 250 seminars, with nearly 4,000 attendees for our budget webinar.
6. How often are you posting on the Technical Hub and what is the range of topics you’re covering?
The Technical Hub only really gets updated when it needs to. It’s fairly comprehensive so most updates are a regular checking it’s correct update and moving on the date it was last checked. When anything knew or big happens then there’s obviously a fair bit of updating required. The LTA abolition was a rather large update as you’d imagine.
We’re more likely to pop things out in our LinkedIn group that we see that we think are of interest.
7. Which three articles on the Technical Hub would you recommend paraplanners read?
It depends what they have going on at any given time!
I have a “Les recommends” section on the website so I normally have what’s topical in there.
We’ve had nearly half a million visits in the last 12 months and the three most read pages are:
• investment bond taxation
• IHT and gifting
• top slicing relief
And these haven’t muted changed over the past few years.
8. What have been the subjects most asked about by advisers and paraplanners in the past year?
The most asked about subjects have been:
• When bonds should be used in preference to OEICs
• Working out tax free cash in the new post LTA abolition world
• The Normal Expenditure out of Income Rules (wit a nod to pensions joining the IHT a party)
And we get a steady stream of trust deeds sent from advisers asking ion the trust can buy a bond (to which the answer is ‘almost always’) and what type of trust it is (for tax purposes).
9. What calculators do you have available for paraplanners to use?
We have 14 calculators on the Tech Matters website – ACCESSIBLE HERE
In order of popularity, they are:
• Annual Allowance Tool
• Bond Gain Modeller
• Tax Relief Modeller
• Transitional Tax Free Amount Tool
• Tax Wrapper Comparison Tool
• Protected Tax Free Cash
• Emergency Tax
• Salary Sacrifice
• Trusts and IHT Modeller
• LSA/LSDBA Modeller
• Redundancy Sacrifice
• Extracting Profits
• Inflation Modeller
The first 5 tools get downloaded over 1,000 times a month on average, more at tax year end.
10. Are there any technical areas you’d advise paraplanners to be wary of at present?
There’s only one really – irrevocable decisions based on the pending pensions and IHT legislation. There is just so much we don’t know yet so there is the danger the final rules leaving clients with a different outcome to the one they believed they were getting, and no way back.
Although that’s not to say there are not some actions that should be considered. Consider nomination of who you would want to inherit your pension if you die before April 2027. Some people may think about passing it to children while it’s IHT free, especially where the spouse does not need the money. And moving tax free cash that is going to be left untouched after age 75, this should always have been moved onto the next generation regardless of the budget announcements (assuming you wanted your legacy to be larger).
