Hosting the seminar, ‘Pension reform – customer reactions and motivations under the new rules’ at this year’s Financial Service Expo London, mortgage market ‘godfather’ and Front Events chairman John Malone highlighted this issue as being “the biggest story of the whole exhibition”.

He said: “Potentially there will be more people cashing in their annuities next year than there are first-time buyers buying, second-steppers buying and people taking out equity release mortgages. This represents a huge, huge opportunity for the industry. One of the problems we have at the moment is - who gives the advice? The answer is not clear, which means there are opportunities to be explored.”

Michelle Cracknell, Chief Executive of the Pensions Advisory Service, agreed with the points raised, adding:

“A number of people are either being required, because of their provider or under regulatory guidance, to go and get financial advice. This kind of undermines the real value attached to the advice process as essentially people are being told to do it rather than really appreciate just how much it can benefit them.

“Importantly, when people are looking for this kind of advice they are also struggling to find advisers who will take on the cases. There are a couple of reasons for this - sometimes the cases are very small and as an adviser you have the right to say that’s not my business model, I don’t deal with customers like that. And we don’t have a very good matching service between customers and advisers. I think we, as an industry, really need to work on improving this to try and bridge this advice gap.”