Similarly, JPMorgan Asset Management (JPMAM) singles out its JPM Multi-Asset Income fund as being fit for purpose. Its ‘go anywhere’ global flexible approach allows it to deliver the best income ideas while maintaining the 60 per cent equity/40 per cent bond-risk profile of a traditional balanced fund.
Simon Chinnery, head of UK defined contribution at JPMAM, says: “We are not throwing new products out into the market as we already have a strong stable of funds and solutions. We don’t expect an April 2015 ‘big bang’ and our responsibility as an industry should be to listen to what people actually want.”
But it’s still early days and it would be no surprise if the run into April 2015 sees a flood of product launches catering for different income needs.
Laith Khalaf, senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, acknowledges that it can be better to tweak existing funds than offer new fund launches with no track records, but he suspects that product brains will start working on the latter on return from holiday this September.
Edmund Tirbutt is a freelance journalist
KEY FIGURES
24% – Percentage of households in UK with no private pension wealth in 2010-12
£15,000 – The median average pension wealth of those with defined contribution-type pensions from which they had not drawn an income in 2010-12
£33,000 – The median average amount held in all types of pension schemes in 2010-12
50% – The proportion of employees belonging to a workplace pension scheme rose to 50 per cent in 2013, the first increase since 2006
Source: ONS
