Free Financial Advice vs Delphina

Sarah has £10,000 sitting in her Barclays current account. She is 41, two children, a mortgage, and a workplace pension she has not looked at since 2022. She Googled "free financial advice UK" last Tuesday. She found four different things, none of which gave her a complete answer, and one of which did not exist as a regulated service twelve weeks ago.

This is the article I wish she had found.

As of 6 April 2026, the UK has a brand new kind of free financial advice. The FCA calls it Targeted Support. Your bank can now suggest products to you, in writing, for free. The catch is structural: a bank's Targeted Support can only recommend the bank's own products. That detail changes everything about whether this kind of advice helps you.

Below, I lay out the four layers of financial help that exist in the UK right now, what each one actually delivers, and where each one stops. If you only have five minutes, jump to the table. If you want the worked examples, scroll to the Sarah case studies.

What FCA Targeted Support actually is

In December 2025, the Financial Conduct Authority published PS25/22. The HM Treasury consultation response landed the same day. The FCA Board made the final rules on 26 February 2026. The authorisation gateway opened to firms on 2 March 2026. The regime went live on 6 April 2026.

Here is what changed.

Before 6 April 2026, regulated firms in the UK could offer either generic guidance (no recommendation) or full personal recommendation (a regulated adviser builds you a plan and charges for it). The space between the two was grey. Now it is regulated, and a defined activity.

Under Targeted Support, an FCA-authorised firm (a bank, building society, pension provider, investment platform, or wealth manager) can:

• Identify a group of customers with similar characteristics (for example, "under-40s with £10,000+ in a current account and no active workplace pension top-up")
• Make a product recommendation designed for that group
• Provide it for free, because commission payments are banned for this activity

The recommendation is not personally tailored. It is group-level. It sits between generic guidance and full advice. It is free at the point of use.

Quilter and Royal London are first movers. Barclays has said it intends to launch. Scottish Widows is piloting AI-agent-based Targeted Support in its app. More firms will follow through 2026 and 2027.

The FCA estimates roughly 23 million UK adults are currently underserved by advice and guidance. Targeted Support is the regulator's attempt to close that gap for the largest single segment: people sitting on cash who would benefit from being nudged toward investing or pension saving, without paying adviser fees.

The four layers of financial help in the UK right now

This is the comparison table the FCA does not publish. Each layer is legal, regulated or unregulated in a specific way, and gives you a specific thing.

Read that table again. The four rows in the middle are what actually differentiates these services. The bottom row matters too. Three of these are regulated activities; Delphina is information and decision-support, not regulated advice. That is by design, and I will come back to what it means for you.

Three Sarahs, three different outcomes

Here is what each layer looks like in practice. Three illustrative scenarios. Same starting point, different routes.

Sarah A. Barclays Targeted Support

Sarah has £10,000 in her Barclays current account. She opens the Barclays app one evening and sees a banner: "Based on customers like you, you could be missing out. Consider increasing your pension contributions."

Barclays' algorithm has put her in a group: under-45, £10k+ in cash, low pension contributions. The Targeted Support message is a nudge toward her Barclays Workplace Pension, which she did not realise she still had from a previous job.

What she gets:

• A free, regulated suggestion to increase her pension contributions
• A link to her existing Barclays pension
• Confidence the recommendation is from an FCA-authorised firm, with commission banned

What she does not get:

• A view of the £8,000 in a Halifax ISA she forgot about
• A view of the old Aviva pension from 2014
• A view of the £42,000 in Premium Bonds
• A comparison against what HSBC, AJ Bell, or Vanguard could offer her
• A whole-of-portfolio plan that says "do this first, then this"

The structural catch: Barclays can only recommend Barclays products. If a Vanguard SIPP or a Nutmeg stocks and shares ISA would actually be better for her, Barclays cannot say so. The recommendation is constrained by who is making it.

Sarah B. Full regulated advice

Sarah pays £3,000 upfront to an Independent Financial Adviser. The IFA takes six weeks. They review her full position: £10,000 in Barclays, £8,000 in Halifax ISA, £42,000 Premium Bonds, two workplace pensions totalling £34,000, the mortgage, and her goals for the children's school fees.

The IFA produces a 30-page financial plan. They recommend specific products across providers. They implement the plan and charge an ongoing 0.75% annual fee for review and rebalancing.

What she gets:

• A real personalised plan
• Whole-of-market product recommendations
• A regulated professional on call when markets drop or life changes

What she does not get:

• A live, ongoing view she can open on her phone any morning
• The ability to run scenarios herself (what if I overpay the mortgage instead?)
• Continuous updates as her numbers change

And the cost is real. £3,000 upfront, then roughly £2,250 per year on a £300,000 portfolio forever. For someone who is not yet high net worth, that is a significant ongoing bill.

Sarah C. Delphina

Sarah connects the accounts Delphina supports. The time required depends on the provider, connection method, and whether additional information is needed, so there is no guaranteed fifteen-minute setup.

What she sees:

• Her connected assets and liabilities summarised into a net worth view, with charts where the relevant dashboard view supports them
• Retirement projections based on the information she enters or connects, including her current contributions and assumptions
• The gap between her current position and her stated goals, where the relevant goal and projection data are present
• A prioritised set of planning prompts and actions to review. These are decision-support prompts, not personal product recommendations.

For example, she might review whether her cash allocation, pension contributions, and Premium Bonds fit her stated goals. Delphina does not tell her to move £8,000 to a named product, and it does not execute any change for her.

When each layer is the right answer

There is a real place for each. None of them is universally best.

The honest version: most people in the UK today are in the Delphina lane and do not realise it. They are paying for an IFA they rarely speak to, or they are taking their bank's Targeted Support suggestions as gospel, when their actual problem is that no one has shown them the complete picture.

What Delphina does not replace

I want to be specific about this. We are not a substitute for full regulated advice, and we are not a substitute for the FCA's Targeted Support activity.

Delphina does not:

• Make a personal recommendation for a specific product. We are not authorised to do so, and we do not want to be.
• Cover FCA regulatory protection the way an authorised adviser does. If an IFA gives you bad advice, you have recourse to the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Delphina's output does not carry that cover.
• Implement actions for you. We tell you what to do. You do it.
• Replace a tax adviser for complex inheritance tax, business, or trust planning.

If any of those apply to you, pay for a regulated adviser. That is the honest answer.

What we do is different, and it is what most people actually need first: clarity over what you have, where you stand, and what to do this month. Once you have that, every other layer of financial help works better.

What to do this week

1. Open your bank's app. If they show you a Targeted Support message, read it. Note what they are recommending and what they are not. That gap is the point.
2. List every account, pension, ISA, and investment you hold, including the ones you have forgotten. If you cannot list them, you have the same problem 23 million UK adults have.
3. If you want to see your whole picture in one place before you act on any of it, Delphina is free to start.

Sources

• FCA Policy Statement PS25/22 (11 December 2025)
• FCA news, "FCA opens authorisation gateway for targeted support" (2 March 2026)
• HM Treasury Targeted Support Consultation Response (11 December 2025)

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Targeted Support is a regulated activity available only from FCA-authorised firms. If you are unsure whether a recommendation applies to your circumstances, consider speaking to a qualified financial adviser.