At Defaqto’s recent annual conference - The Confidence Factor 2025 - our Head of Investments, Andy Parsons offered a whistlestop tour through adviser behaviour and product trends across wealth management. Drawing on the depth of data within Defaqto Engage, he highlighted how advisers are making decisions and how the market is shifting rapidly towards MPS.
Parsons remarked that when advisers begin their due diligence journey, the number one criteria selected to aid consideration of a platform and/or product is financial strength, the AKG rating ranking above all else. This was followed by service quality, as captured by Defaqto’s service ratings. Only after those two factors do advisers drill into the nuts and bolts of the platform's features such as ISAs, PPPs, online illustrations, and general investment options.
Looking at personal pensions, Royal London’s Pension Portfolio core investments led adviser recommendations, with Aviva close behind. Key features that advisers filter for include capped drawdown, self-investment, free switches, and erosion flags.
The picture shifts when advisers look at SIPPs, where Aviva and abrdn sit neck-and-neck. Criteria such as minimum insured funds and transfer flexibility become more important. In investment bonds, Prudential’s Investment Plan stands out clearly, with smoothed funds and with-profits options returning to the spotlight.
In protection, Aviva’s Life Insurance Plus upgraded was most frequently recommended, followed by Royal London. The top adviser priorities go beyond cover levels to include claim support services, waiver of premium, and increasingly, health and wellbeing add-ons, showing how services now differentiate products as much as core features.
The most striking trend shared was the rapid rise of MPS. Data from Engage shows that while new business recommendations into multi-asset funds have long dominated, the use of MPS solutions are surging, and on a trajectory set to overtake multi-asset. By the end of 2025, Defaqto forecasts a near 55/45 split in favour of multi-asset, but the direction of travel is clear.
Advisers approach due diligence differently depending on product type. For multi-asset, performance quartiles over three and five years remain the key measure. For MPS, cost is the primary concern, followed by whether portfolios are active, passive, or hybrid with performance metrics coming lower down the list.
Historically, MPS has been harder to benchmark than multi-asset but Andy highlighted the launch of Defaqto’s MPS Comparator back in May 2024, which has led to the creation of league tables of performance, risk, and cost across more than 2,000 platform portfolios finally allowing an “apples with apples” comparison.
As he concluded, MPS and multi-asset are not adversaries but complementary tools within centralised propositions. But the data is clear: MPS is no longer a niche as it is fast becoming a mainstream choice for advisers and clients alike.
Click here to download Andy Parson's full presentation from the day.