More than three out of five (63%) of IFAs have a negative view, with one in four (25%) being very negative.
Jeremy Leach, managing director of MPL, said: “With-profits investments have been delivering very poor returns for some years now and the turbulence seen on financial markets over the last year will undermine those returns further. With-profits was once a major consideration in the advice offered by IFAs but now it is rapidly becoming a dead duck. Our research shows that only 19% of IFAs are now proactively recommending with-profits investments to their clients. But it is not that investors have lost their appetite for the steady, predictable returns that with-profits policies once offered, it is just that they are failing to deliver.”
A substantial majority (59%) of IFAs are proactively trying to find an alternative investment product that has many of the characteristics of with-profits investments, according to the research.
