Government Advisory on Pension Policy and Tech

Researching a new national auto-enrolment (pillar 1) pension tool.

The Challenge

Our client, a consortium led by the Open Identity Exchange / No. 10 Downing Street Cabinet Office and made up of HM Treasury, Dept Work & Pensions, and a Government agency, Money Advice Service and Barclays Bank plc, sought to research and define a new platform of pillar 1 pension technology.

Our client had a problem in that it wasn’t clear to what extent ordinary citizens were (or were not) engaged with their retirement savings.

The new ‘pension finder tool’ was a platform of new pension technology designed to assist citizens to become aware of the deficit in their overall retirement savings.

The tool also had to create a behavioural ‘nudge’, motivating the ordinary person to become more active in their approach to retirement and later-life savings and investments.

Our Move

We used a mixture of desk-based and focus group research to assist the client.

This allowed us to discover real-world attitudes and circumstances towards pension and retirement savings and investments (or lack of it) in the national community at large.

Following on from the research activities which our client carried out we drafted and edited a 16-page report, ‘The Pensions Finder Tool, a Discovery Project White Paper’.

The report was distributed online and amongst Government, public sector and private sector stakeholders. The report was presented in various public fora.

The British Government acted on the findings of the report.

The Government commissioned further pensions technology developments, including an Alpha Pension Finder Tool and the up-coming Pensions Dashboard.

The Result

As in all countries, pensions engagement in the UK is low in the general public.

It is hoped that, by using innovative pension technology, greater retirement savings and investment will occur in the community and the early signs of that are encouraging.