Pension Provider Report 2018 Contents
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Thomsons Online Benefits Pension Provider Report 2018 Contents Introduction 3 The future of financial wellness enhanced 4 by connectivity A shrinking provider market 7 About this report 10 Mercer Workplace Savings 14 Aegon 16 Aviva 22 Legal & General 28 Royal London 33 Scottish Widows 36 Standard Life 43 Appendix 1: NMG – Broad market opinion 50 (adviser sentiment) Appendix 2: High level statistics 50 Appendix 3: Thomsons Online Benefits service 52 statistics Appendix 4: DarwinTM fund range 53 Appendix 5: Default fund performance 53 Appendix 6: Access to savings 54 Appendix 7: Quick comparison 54 2 | Pension Provider Report 2018 Introduction Neil Atkinson Head of Proposition Welcome to the 2018 Pension Provider Report, our annual review of the UK group pension provider market. Typically, workplace pension provision is the largest benefit spend for our clients. With this in mind, to ensure we deliver the best possible pension solution for our clients, we are constantly evaluating the market on your behalf. This report is the culmination of our client provider review activity throughout the year and applies multiple objective data sources, coupled with our own operational experience, to provide you with the best quality summary of how providers stack up. Crucially, this report gives our readers an opportunity to understand our view on provider propositions, their service quality and approach to technology. In addition, we look into the rise of data analytics, the explosion of fintech companies offering financial wellness solutions and the opportunities that technology and partnerships present to deliver better financial outcomes for employers and their people. Following our acquisition by Mercer in December 2016, it’s been a privilege to share and collaborate with the wider team at Mercer to increase the value we bring to our Thomsons consulting clients. As we look forward to summer and beyond, we’ll be building out our suite of products and services. This includes developments in the advised services space, deeper and more enhanced DarwinTM provider connectivity as well as building out Darwin enhancements, particularly with our Retirement Planner, where members can look forward to a consumer-grade member experience and a new-and-improved investment risk modeller. Furthermore, we are in talks with a host of new and exciting third party providers of financial wellness solutions to deliver an updated proposition, ensuring that we enable our clients to deliver the very best solutions for their people. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this year’s report! If you have any questions or feedback please get in touch with your usual Thomsons contact or email us at [email protected]. One last thing, if you want to keep up-to-date with our latest articles, webinars, podcasts and videos why not follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter? Click here to follow us on LinkedIn Click here to follow us on Twitter Pension Provider Report 2018 | 3 The Future of Financial Wellness Enhanced by Connectivity Neil Atkinson Head of Proposition Technology underpins everything we do at Thomsons. That’s why adopting our award- winning software Darwin is a prerequisite to taking our pension governance consulting services. This is because we believe, and indeed can prove, that higher employee engagement and pension contribution rates are achieved through delivering workplace pensions through technology. If you’ve read our annual provider review before, you’ll know that the extent to which we can connect with pension providers to ensure an enhanced member experience impacts our overall assessment. It’s much the same with financial wellness. This section of the report aims to help you better understand the rapidly evolving financial wellness landscape; and hear how we’re engaging with the provider market to deliver great solutions to employees and help our clients boost their employee value proposition. We believe scalable digital solutions, delivered through Darwin, will ultimately help people make better financial decisions. Aside from salary, the amount employers spend on workplace pensions is likely to be their single largest benefit cost. Whilst we proudly evangelise the benefits of saving into a workplace pension, we also recognise that employee needs vary hugely, even within generational segments. More and more people are feeling more immediate financial stress as they aim to make ends meet month-to-month. This stress can also be put down to struggling to service expensive debt, not knowing how to save and reacting to the perceived complexities of their own financial situation with inaction. In today’s always-on society, it’s easy for people to put personal finances into the ‘do it later’ pile, rather than engaging with it and making positive decisions. In short, financial matters don’t really ‘come alive’ for most people. However, the market is reacting with a clutch of emerging providers, mostly in the fintech space, seeking to engage users with simple products, engaging interfaces, transparent charging structures and lean operating models. These providers tend to be agile and their propositions focused on customers’ self-serving. Big financial institutions are investing heavily and taking stakes in many of the emerging platforms such as Legal & General (L&G) and Salary Finance, Unum and Smarterly, Goldman Sachs and Neyber, and Aviva and Wealthify. Additionally, providers such as Aviva are taking this digital revolution very seriously in their own right, and bringing R&D in-house by setting up incubator-style entities staffed by industry outsiders and data scientists. Emergent new providers are on the whole, product-focused. Entrepreneurial in spirit; fintechs see a niche or specific customer need and then build a product around it. Product-led solutions work up to a point, and deliver value to customers where demand exists, or where it’s created by nudges, engagement or communications. There’s a role in the workplace for product hosting and provider introduction, but also just as much a role for engagement, education and promoting self-awareness to empower people to make better decisions. This is evidenced by point-solution providers expanding into financial education in order to round out their propositions. However, these bolt-on education modules are often seen as accompaniments to the main product and no matter how personalised, are premised on users seeking the information out, reading it and acting on it. 4 | Pension Provider Report 2018 Education and engagement is the mainstay of how employers communicate to their people; and rightly so. Comms can be targeted, personalised, branded appropriately and span different media. However, there’s a different way of looking at financial wellness which has quietly been gaining traction over the last 5 or so years; account aggregation. Our own Employee Benefits Watch 2018 research highlights how Millennials want easier access to their benefits via SSO, integrating multiple provider platforms in a single place, interacting via apps on mobile devices, and using interactive tools. Aggregation gives users this experience and adoption is poised to accelerate in the wake of the European Payment Service Directive (PSD2). For the sake of clarity, Open Banking is the UK version of PSD2. The difference is that whereas PSD2 requires banks to open up their data to third parties, Open Banking dictates that they do so in a standard format. Open Banking allows people to be more in control of their own financial information. It stemmed from a UK government investigation which highlighted a lack of choice for consumers and a lack of competition on the part of banks. Nine UK banks and building societies are now required to make certain data accessible to other approved companies in a standardised, straightforward and secure way, following explicit consent from the consumer (although at the time of writing only four have released their API data). The process is underpinned by a set of security protocols to ensure the safety of this data. What this means in practice is an increasingly emergent set of fintech companies mining this rich vein of data for the benefit of consumers. Account aggregators are important because they’re not focused on individual product needs, rather bringing together a customer’s entire financial position and net worth in one place. They allow a user’s own banking data to be served directly to them within the confines of an aggregator application, which is approved by the FCA if they’re using Open Banking. So think forensic line-by-line details of all banking transactions from multiple accounts. This can then split automatically into different spend areas and give user’s a detailed position of what they spend their money on. Within a workplace context, data on your workplace pension can be also be fed into these apps via standard API technology from the benefit platform or provider. The ‘so what’ is that detailed spending habits can be used to help individuals plan better, save more, and highlight better financial decisions. The technology does the hard work and the user sees everything in one place. A central aggregator solution like this is a good place to start for financial wellness as the model works on a subscription basis, so charging is transparent. Crucially, it is provider agnostic and its central tenet is a user’s own highly specific financial circumstances and not a provider imperative. Are you wondering how a 10% pay rise will affect your financial life? Let the algorithm model it for you. Are you wondering if you can replace the 10-year-old car on the drive and keep saving at your current rate? Are you keen to cut down on monthly spending to save for a wedding and know what the impact might be in 5 years’ time? See how much you spend on your morning coffee or your broadband and get an idea of how much you could save.