Targeted support is live. Here's why paraplanners should be paying close attention

Since 6 April 2026, firms with the right permissions have been able to offer "targeted support", a new form of consumer support sitting between generic guidance and full regulated advice. The framework lets firms support clients with decisions about investments and pensions on the basis of limited information rather than a comprehensive assessment of a client's circumstances, delivering a ready made suggestion based on a client's alignment with a predefined consumer segment.

It's a genuinely new category in UK financial services, and it's easy to see why it's been framed as a way to close the advice gap. But I think it raises a quieter question that's more relevant to paraplanning than the headlines suggest: what happens to the discipline of individual suitability when the unit of assessment becomes the segment, not the person?

A different kind of suitability test

Targeted support isn't subject to the suitability standards in COBS 9 and 9A that apply to personal recommendations, instead, a new COBS 9B suitability test requires firms to be satisfied on reasonable grounds that a ready made suggestion is suitable for an individual within a defined consumer segment. That's a subtly different test to the one paraplanners are used to building evidence for. It's suitability by inference, "people like this generally benefit from this", rather than suitability by individual Fact Find.

That's not necessarily wrong. For a huge cohort of consumers who currently get no support at all, a well designed segment level suggestion is unquestionably better than nothing. But it does mean the quality of the segmentation itself - how a firm defines and evidences its consumer segments - becomes the new front line of good practice, in the way individual fact-finding used to be.

Where this touches paraplanning directly

Firms offering targeted support are still expected to not provide targeted support in relation to safeguarded benefits, and the regime carries real restrictions around pension consolidation specifically to stop targeted support drifting into implied personal recommendations. That boundary between a genuinely segment level suggestion and something that functions as advice in practice, is exactly the kind of line Paraplanners are trained to interrogate. As more firms build out targeted support propositions, I'd expect technical and compliance minded paraplanning input to be increasingly valuable in designing segment logic that holds up to scrutiny, not just in writing suitability reports after the fact. 

The bigger picture

Notably, targeted support is likely to work best for firms with a direct to consumer relationship i.e. banks, building societies and platforms, while advisers without that direct channel may find it fits less naturally with their business model. For most IFA and financial planning firms, that probably means targeted support isn't a replacement for advice led work any time soon. But it does reshape the wider landscape those firms operate in, and it's a useful reminder that "advice" is no longer the only regulated category worth understanding properly.