The decumulation problem
Your clients deserve better than guesswork
Decumulation is the hardest problem in financial planning. And right now, most firms are solving it with spreadsheets, gut feel, and fingers crossed.
Here is what actually happens in most advice firms today: an adviser sits down with a client's retirement plan and manually works through which wrapper to draw from first. Pension or ISA? Crystallise now or wait? Take the tax-free cash or defer it? Every decision is a judgement call. Every judgement call leaves money on the table.
The numbers are brutal. A suboptimal drawdown sequence can cost a client tens of thousands of pounds over their lifetime. Not because the adviser is bad, because the problem is genuinely hard. There are thousands of possible transaction paths through a client's wrapper landscape, and a human cannot evaluate them all.
Monte Carlo simulation tells you the probability of running out of money. It does not tell you what to actually do about it. Basic drawdown calculators model one wrapper at a time. Neither produces a specific, executable plan that accounts for tax, allowances, sequencing, and mortality across every year of a client's life.
That is the gap the Lifetime Portfolio Optimiser fills. Not with approximations. Not with AI. With mathematics.
Goals in. Optimal transactions out.
The Lifetime Portfolio Optimiser uses operations research — specifically mathematical optimisation — to compute the exact sequence of transactions a client should execute across their entire remaining lifetime.
You define the client's goals: retirement income of £40,000 from age 60, school fees of £15,000 per year from 2028 to 2035, a house deposit of £50,000 at age 65, a legacy target of £200,000. The LPO takes those goals and works backwards through every combination of pensions, ISAs, GIAs, bonds, and other wrappers to find the mathematically optimal path.
Not a good path. Not a reasonable path. The optimal path.
It accounts for income tax bands, capital gains allowances, pension crystallisation rules, tax-free cash entitlements, annual ISA limits, bond top-slicing, mortality assumptions, and inflation, simultaneously, across every future year. The output is not a recommendation to review. It is a specific set of transactions ready to execute: withdraw £12,400 from the ISA in year one, crystallise £47,000 of pension in year two, move £8,600 to drawdown in year three.
Produced in seconds. Auditable. Deterministic. Given the same inputs, you get the same optimal answer every time.
This is not artificial intelligence
This distinction matters. The LPO is a deterministic algorithm built on operations research. There is no neural network, no training data, no probabilistic output. It solves for the mathematical optimum under defined constraints. No hallucination. No randomness. No black box. Every output is fully explainable, fully auditable, and fully compliant.
Performance
The numbers speak for themselves
Full lifetime plan computed
Goal coverage optimised across all wrappers
Invested in Focus platform R&D
Zero unplanned downtime
Same inputs, same optimal output, every time
API domains powering the platform
How is this different?
Built into the Focus platform. Accessible via API.
The LPO is not a standalone tool. It is deeply integrated into the Focus advice platform and available as part of our 23 API domains covering 352 routes and 633 endpoints.
Works with Advice Engine
The Advice Engine handles point-in-time portfolio optimisation, what should this client do right now? The LPO extends that to the full lifetime horizon. Use them together for complete coverage: optimal transactions today and an optimal path for every year ahead.
Feeds into Advice Delivery
LPO outputs flow directly into your advice delivery workflow. The optimal transactions become case actions, suitability report inputs, and client communications, no rekeying, no interpretation, no manual transfer.
API accessible
Call the LPO programmatically via our REST APIs. Submit client goals and financial data, receive the optimal lifetime transaction plan as structured data. Build it into your own tools, dashboards, or client portals.
Trusted by firms including NFU Mutual, Skipton Building Society, and abrdn. Backed by £15m in platform investment and 15 years of zero unplanned downtime.
See the LPO in action
Mathematically optimal decumulation for every client, every year, in seconds. No other UK platform does this.