It’s not enough to ask clients when they want to retire

For years, longevity has lived at the margins of financial services conversations, acknowledged as a demographic trend but rarely treated as a strategic priority. That is beginning to change.

Manulife Financial’s launch of its Longevity Institute, backed by a $350 million investment over five years, is one of the clearest signals yet that longevity is moving from concept to commitment.

Importantly, this shift is not confined to Canada. Manulife is a global organization, and this investment reflects a broader international recognition that longer lives are reshaping how financial institutions think about work, retirement and long-term client relationships.

One of the most compelling examples I’ve come across is at Fidelidade, Portugal’s leading insurer. Mafalda Honório holds a role I had never encountered before in financial services: head of longevity marketing.

Her mandate isn’t about selling products to older clients. It is to help the organization rethink how it supports people throughout a much longer, more complex life journey. She didn’t even come from insurance; her background is in consumer goods.

Seeing longevity through a consumer lens

Before joining Fidelidade, Honório spent 15 years at Unilever, where one principle guided everything: the consumer is the boss. That perspective shaped how she approached longevity from day one.

“What struck me immediately, was that longevity isn’t about old people,” she told me. “It’s about life.”

That distinction matters. In financial services, longevity is often framed as a problem to manage due to longer retirements, higher healthcare costs and a greater risk of outliving savings. Honório took a different view. She saw longevity as a whole-of-life opportunity, not a late-life issue.

That reframing became the foundation of Fidelidade’s longevity strategy.

Rather than starting with products, her team began with people and researched how they live, work, care for others and navigate major life transitions over decades. That shift forced difficult internal conversations about segmentation, product timelines and success metrics.

Fidelidade began testing new ways of engaging customers earlier in midlife, before traditional retirement planning begins. The team explored partnerships beyond insurance to better support health, caregiving and long-term well-being. From there, they began to rethink how the organization shows up across a customer’s life.

Breaking the linear life model

One of the first assumptions Honório challenged was the traditional linear life path that still underpins much of retirement planning: education, work, retirement.

“That model no longer fits,” she said. “Longevity turns life into a multi-stage, non-linear journey.”

People are living longer and healthier lives. Retirement can last 25 or 30 years. Careers are no longer single arcs. Many people cycle through reinvention, caregiving, part-time work and encore careers well into their 60s and 70s.

Yet financial advice and products are still largely designed around a single retirement date, an assumption that increasingly clashes with how clients actually experience later life.

For advisors, this creates a growing disconnect that shows up in client conversations, particularly when plans built around a single exit from work no longer align with phased retirements, caregiving breaks or extended periods of reinvention. Clients do not experience retirement as a one-time event. They experience it as a series of transitions that unfold over decades — financial, personal and emotional.

The myth of the 60-plus segment

Another insight from Honório’s work will feel familiar to advisors who work closely with clients later in life — seniors are no longer a single market.

When Fidelidade studied people over 60, it found enormous diversity in health, financial independence, family roles, purpose and aspirations.

“We put everyone over 60 in the same basket,” Honório said. “That’s one of the biggest mistakes we make.”

This diversity is increasing, not shrinking. Longer lives mean more variation in how people age, how long they work, how they support others and what they want next.

For advisors, age-based assumptions are becoming less useful than transition-based thinking. The focus shifts from how old clients are to the life transition they are navigating next.

From products to partnerships

Honório also sees the industry moving slowly away from selling standalone products. In parts of Asia, she noted, insurers are already integrating financial solutions with health-care delivery and prevention.

“The future isn’t about isolated products,” she said. “It’s about supporting outcomes across health, wealth and care.”

This mirrors what many Canadian advisors are seeing. Clients increasingly want guidance that connects financial planning with real life, including health shocks, caregiving responsibilities, phased work and intergenerational support.

Advice needs to evolve, too.

In a longevity-driven world, Honório argues that advisors can no longer construct investment portfolios or sell insurance based on static life-stage assumptions. They need to understand a client’s life map — how they live, work, care and transition — and translate that into a flexible financial plan.

“The advisor of the future evolves from a financial expert into a life advisor,” she told me, “someone who listens and translates life into financial architecture.”

That does not mean abandoning technical rigour. It means expanding the conversation so financial strategies can adapt as life changes.

Longevity is strategic

Longevity is no longer an abstract concept or a distant demographic trend. When a global insurer like Fidelidade creates a senior leadership role dedicated to longevity, and when a global organization like Manulife commits $350 million to a Global Longevity Institute, it is a signal that financial services is beginning to take longer lives seriously as a strategic opportunity.

For advisors, this matters now. Clients are already living the reality of longer and less linear lives. They are working longer, caring for parents and adult children, experimenting with phased retirement and redefining what it means to retire. The gap is no longer on the client side. It is in how advice models, planning assumptions and product development respond to those lived experiences.

The opportunity for advisors is not to become longevity experts overnight, but to shift how they listen and frame conversations. One starting point is to challenge a familiar question. Don’t just ask your client when they want to retire, ask what transitions they expect over the next 10 to 20 years, and how flexible their plan needs to be to support those shifts?

This means moving beyond age-based assumptions and paying closer attention to life transitions rather than retirement dates. It also means designing financial strategies that can flex as clients move through reinvention, caregiving and extended periods of uncertainty.