Aegon also highlights that these letters need to ‘work’ as part of a much longer staged engagement journey so people are truly ‘woken up’ to the topics that matter and know where and when to get guidance and advice as they progress from accumulating retirement savings to taking their benefits and making the most of their retirement.
Steven Cameron, Pensions Director at Aegon said: “While auto enrolment has been a success in bringing millions more into saving for retirement, the next big challenge, and it’s a giant step, is to get people properly engaged much earlier with their pensions. That means making sure people are thinking about the right things at the right time. Under the previous regime, individuals might not have received relevant communications until they were approaching age 55. These latest rules from the FCA mean all those with an individual or workplace personal pension will receive a much simpler letter at age 50, referring to pensions freedoms, highlighting key information and risks.
“While an industry wide standard of communicating at age 50 is one helpful ‘small step’, pensions communications are not about a single point in time. The challenge is making sure messages are meaningful, in the context of communications that have come before and which will follow and there’s a big benefit in issuing specific, relevant prompts at earlier ages. Ideally, providers and schemes will communicate the right information, at the right level, at the right time and through the best medium to truly improve member engagement and retirement outcomes. Regular communications have a role to play alongside other initiatives such as mid-life MOTs, the PLSA’s Retirement Living Standards and Aegon’s video summaries*. As retirement approaches, communications should build in additional levels of detail to help people prepare ahead and in many cases seek advice to make the most of their hard earned retirement savings.”
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