Welcome to Illuminate News

Welcome to our new newsletter. This is an exciting step as we bring together the two previous newsletters for James Hay (eNews) and Nucleus Wrap (Nuspeak) under our new brand.  

We intend this to be a great channel for keeping you informed about how we’re using our scale to invest in our products, the price your clients pay and in improving service for Nucleus Wrap and James Hay Online.

So, as well as sharing all the news and developments to help you grow your business, manage your risks and create capacity so you can also offer excellent service to your customers, we’ll also tailor updates about the improvements we’re making to the platform you use.

It’s been a busy start to 2023 for us and we’ve lots to share with you.  

Despite some late trailing, the budget still offered some surprises. Our technical specialists poured through the detail of this very complex area of financial planning as it emerged, so you don’t have to. We believe there are some positive opportunities for you to work with your clients who were previously caught by the lifetime and annual allowance restrictions, as well as those with enhanced or fixed protection. As always, the devil is in the detail, and in Business Updates we share how we can help you.

You’ll have no doubt read in the press that at the end of February, we obtained approval from the Curtis Banks shareholders for our acquisition of their business. Find out what this means for our group, and ultimately you and your clients, in the business updates section.  

And on a personal level, one of the things I’m most proud of is the recent launch of the Nucleus charitable foundation, with £750k of initial funding from our shareholders to distribute to good causes. We explain on the next page what we’re aiming to achieve by using our scale as a force for good in our communities, especially, for example, in helping more women enter and succeed within our profession.  

A feature that was popular in Nuspeak was ‘You said, so we did’. This is where we round up details of changes we’ve made on the back of your feedback and suggestions for how we can make our platforms more efficient and easier for you to use. We’ve continued this feature within Nucleus Wrap updates and will launch it for James Hay too from our next edition.  

We’re starting to hear really positive feedback about the service improvements we’ve made within James Hay, so in this edition, our James Hay updates share an overview of our current performance and how we’re continuing to build on that progress.   

Your feedback really is important to us, so if there’s anything you think we can do to improve our products and services, please get in touch with your usual contact. 

Richard Rowney
Chief Executive Officer