Some questions are easier to think about before you discuss them. These tools are here so you can gather your own position in your own time, at whatever pace suits you.
They are a starting point rather than an answer. Nothing here is a recommendation, and nothing here takes account of your full circumstances. When you are ready, the conversation picks up wherever you have got to.
A self-service fact find and a needs analysis tool sit on the line between guidance and advice, and which side they fall on is not a design choice.
A tool returning “households at your stage typically consider income protection before pension contributions” is generic guidance. A tool returning “you have an income protection shortfall of €340,000” is a personal recommendation, produced from information the consumer supplied about their own circumstances, which no adviser has seen. The firm’s suitability obligations attach to the second and not to the first.
The recommendation is that every tool is built as guidance, that each ends on a question rather than a figure, and that the output routes into a conversation. That is also the stronger commercial position. A calculator that hands over a number has completed the transaction. A tool that hands over a better question creates the meeting.
Any projected fund value, retirement income or maturity figure. The estimates warning must render with the result, not on the input screen.
Any calculator embedding tax relief, age-related contribution limits or thresholds. All seven conditions plus a visible publication date, on the results screen. The most easily missed of these.
Any tool touching invested funds.
Warnings boxed, bold, at or above body size, and simultaneous with the output. In an interactive tool this means inside the results component, surviving at 375px.
Field labels are where acronyms hide. PRSA, AVC, ARF and PHI will all appear in a fact find.
A budgeting calculator is arguably unregulated activity; a pension needs analysis is not. Any unregulated tool needs its own page and the second footer variant.
A fact find collects financial and potentially health information. Notice at the point of collection, a lawful basis, and a decision on whether a partially completed fact find is retained at all.
