AgeWage has laid out in its mission statement who it hopes to help and why. But we’d like to be specific about what we hope to do and when. This blog sets out our specific intentions.
We believe that everyone needs to understand their retirement savings and have help in how they spend them. For younger workers, this is about investing for the future, for older people it’s about making the best of what they’ve saved.
Only about 1 in 10 of us takes formal financial advice and often that’s only to achieve a specific goal like buying a house or unlocking a defined benefit pension scheme. At the end of our journey – we see AgeWage becoming the comparison service that enables people to compare what they’ve got with what they could have and make rational and sensible decisions on their own.
Our long term aim is to be the Pension Aisle in the Money Supermarket, the Compare the Pension Market. We may even become a standalone comparison service. We expect to be able and authorised to deliver a whole of market comparison service by the beginning of 2020.
Between now and then we will be “mapping the pension genome” by working with partners to fully understand the needs of specific groups of savers.
This means that immediately we will be working with insurers and master trust providers on specific projects. For instance we are working with one insurer keen to migrate some part of its back-book into modern policies which would clearly better suit the majority of legacy policyholders. We expect to be working with some of the major master trust providers helping them to avoid “pot proliferation” by enabling members to permit the transfer of small pots from one master trust to another.
While we are working with insurers and master trusts we will be working with Pension Bee, who we are proud to be our first customer. Pension Bee want to help their customers to bring together pots they’ve built up with other pension providers. We’ll be giving their customers and the Bee Keepers who support them, the information they need to take decisions on what to do.
While all this is going on we’ll be working with the Regulators and especially the FCA , testing three hypotheses,
- Are the AgeWage Value for Money Scores right?
- Do they encourage sensible behaviour in people getting them?
- Are these scores providing guidance or advice?
We’re committed to being totally transparent about what we do and we intend to tell our customers, our partners and our regulators exactly what we are up to and what we intend to do in future.
There’s no room for secrecy when your aim is to simplify and explain!
