Gathering personal circumstances data
Apps also offer providers the potential to front-end any app onboarding process by finding out more about each user’s circumstances: exploring retirement expectations, any vulnerabilities or circumstances that might limit ability to work full-time, save regularly, and much more.
Treating young app users as individuals and enabling them to build their own retirement plan on their smart phone is surely the way to engender deeper engagement.
Whole-of-life apps
Providers could be even more holistic in their thinking to seek customer engagement as early as possible by creating a whole-of-life financial planning app, supporting younger members regardless of where they are on life’s journey.
My eldest daughter is eight, and while a bit too young for a financial planning app I have recently introduced her to NatWest’s Rooster card and app, which allows her to earn money through chores, see her balance and pay for things on her own card.
It has been a revelation for both getting her to help around the house and for understanding how money works.
What would be great is that these apps evolve as user’s grow and, through the power of artificial intelligence and open APIs (application programming interfaces), offer suggestions based on personalised data and where the individual is on life’s journey.
There are many other big life events to plan and save for: building a deposit for their first home, paying for a wedding, supporting time away from the workplace for one half of the couple for parenting, creating a top up tuition fee fund for children, and much more.
If the apps of the future can offer a place to plan all saving, then it is natural for customers to use that same app to explore pensions contribution adjustment during accumulation, retirement income planning and even laying inheritance plans down.
Alerts support re-engagement
In short, engagement does not need to start or stop once regular contributions are being put into a pension pot.
Alerts could be set up to bring users back into the app if their regular income has increased and they might want to explore how a corresponding increase in pension contribution could feed through to slightly earlier retirement or higher income in retirement.
Effectively gamifying this planning and making both accumulation and decumulation more dynamic, and dare I say interesting for younger people, cannot fail to improve pensions engagement amongst this permanently ‘connected’ generation.
In retirement, it could also help enable people to keep their retirement income in line with remaining savings pots, nudging adjustments up or down based on investment performance or a range of other scenarios, some of which may have been planned for way back in the accumulation phase.
