Opinion  

Nobody told me I had to save more

Simoney Kyriakou

Simoney Kyriakou

And even those who do communicate do not always do it well. Simply pinging an email a couple of times a year is unlikely to get good engagement, especially if staff already have hundreds of emails clogging up their inbox. 

Those who are good at communication find it difficult to encourage staff to increase their contributions, where possible, due to the cost-of-living crisis, so messages have had to be prepared carefully and with a lot of thought around engagement, delivery and follow-ups. 

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You can read some of the best-practice ways in which employers have done this by visiting the people at Nudge, whose recent wellbeing and benefits awards showcase some of the great ways in which companies large and small have tried to boost pension and protection take-up.

Whose job is it anyway?

Employers, for sure, should be the first port of call. Their communications need to be vastly better and more frequent and more engaging.

The advice/guidance boundary review proposals should help corporate advisers and advisers with small employers to deliver engaging and appropriate pension guidance to a wide range of employees, giving them ample warning to take action.

Government, too, needs to step up, address the proposed 2017 auto-enrolment reforms, and help tackle what will be a significant pension gap between expectation and reality. 

Hand-in-hand with that comes financial education - governments and regulators alike should get on board with making sure Britain's schools are delivering fit-for-purpose money knowledge to young people so they can make more informed decisions when they start earning.

Providers need to do more, too. How about giving better guidance and information to the pension schemes they manage, which can be passed down more frequently, and in Plain English, to employees?

Why not use tools such as the video series produced by Money Alive, which gives the viewer ways of accessing and acknowledging they have watched and understood the topic?

News outlets, such as FT Adviser, need to hold ministers to account over pension promises, so that legislative reforms and sensible recommendations do not get kicked far over the bar and into the long grass, like an overzealous penalty taker in the Euros.

(That's my one football analogy there. Sorry I haven't got any more). 

And the individual? Well, I'm also going to say that if all the above is being done by all the above, then there really is little more that we can do to encourage people to get on board.

I am sure if every single person in financial services, as well as regulators, policymakers and journalists, did their part to the absolute maximum, there would still be people marching with pitchforks on parliament in 10 years' time, claiming "nobody told us".