5 big things members ask us about pensions

Want to encourage people to engage with their workplace pension savings?

Ask them what they really want to know – and help them get informed.

Ask people about their first car and they’ll probably tell you the make, mileage, and cost to buy and insure. But ask them about their first pension – or current workplace pension for that matter – and they might struggle to say how much they’ve saved, how many pensions they’ve got, or even how a pension works.

How do I know?  I spend a lot of time talking and asking people about pensions during our monthly employer webinars, on client site visits, and hosting and taking part in podcasts (a recent guest spot on the ‘90s Baby Show’ was particularly memorable) to take the mystique out of pensions. It’s something I’m genuinely enthusiastic, and perhaps a bit obsessed, about. 

I even ended up discussing pensions with a friendly bunch of 20-somethings while having a solo dinner during a work trip recently. We got talking and it turned out their company scheme had just joined Scottish Widows and I was able to help them understand why pensions matter in your twenties, just as they do at any age. Perhaps more so, with more time to build up those pension savings.

It’s our employer webinars, though, which give the most and deepest insights into what people really want to know. Surveys are good, of course, but when thousands of people can ask anything at all about pensions, we’re not telling them what we think they need to know. They’re telling us – and it’s the best kind of data to have.

We got almost 2,500 questions, mostly from our Pension Engagement Season webinars, at the end of 2023. We warmed people up before each session with a fun, interactive 10-minute play on the Pension Mirror which ramped up the excitement and got them thinking about their own pension. They could then use free text to send any questions at all about pensions – all 2,500 of them.

Using AI to decode the data

Having that amount of data could be incredibly complicated to make sense of but we used AI to quickly get to the nub of what people really want to know. We gave the AI guidance on keywords and terms to look for (AI needs an overlay of human knowledge) and got it to analyse the data and sift out repetition, pulling it into themes. 

2,500 pension questions, 5 big themes:

1. Pension transfers: This is always the top question we get from members – how can I transfer in my old pension pots – and various versions of this. Last year more than 50,000 scheme members transferred in their pension using our digital services – so it’s an easy, well-tried process.
2. Investment performance: Here you get the complete spectrum of pension knowledge, from members wondering if they should stop their plans as they had a bad year’s investment performance, to those asking really in-depth questions. The surprise for me was the number of questions related to the Mansion House Compact – I thought that was niche knowledge!
3. Retirement options: There was a real focus here on fund value and tax-free cash. It’s clear we collectively need to do more to get people thinking about income in retirement – but people really do love Tax Free Cash – even the name makes it sound amazing.
4. Scottish Widows app: Questions fell into three areas – how do I access it?  Help me understand some of things I’m seeing and what action can I take through the app?  Given the sheer number of feature drops over the year it’s no wonder not everybody was up to speed with what they could do. 
   
5. Tax and contributions: Questions here focused on two areas; how do my allowances work, with people wanting to maximise contributions,  and people who were a bit confused that they couldn’t see their personal contributions or tax relief – particularly so for salary sacrifice schemes. 
   

We answer all these questions and more during our employer webinars every month where we cover everything from pension essentials and financial wellbeing through to ESG in investments and how to use the Scottish Widows’ app to make the most of a pension. 

There are lots of resources on Be Money Well, with tips, tools, guides, articles and guidance to help people understand, manage and start conversations about their finances.

Head over to our Podcast channel to hear more about Scottish Widows Workplace Pensions including an in-depth look at the 2500 questions and themes.