One app for the rich – nowt for the poor!

We all know that LifeSight is a very rich workplace pension. It houses the pension savings workers at Vodafone, Bupa and other spectacularly mindful employers have built up and is now one of the biggest DC occupational plans in the country, I come to praise it not to bury it.

Sadly, if you click on the link of the embed above, you get this .

This is because , the LifeSight App can’t be shared either on linked in or on this blog. It is a thing of beauty behind a walled garden, it is for a gated community of lucky savers who have bosses who want LifeSight and who LifeSight want in their garden.

I’m all for excellence and all for exclusivity. If I was WTW, I would be dangling the carrot of the LifeSight app in precisely this way, attracting the right kind of customer like the shop windows of Bond St do.

But a pension app, unlike a mighty diamond or haute couture is not beyond the reach of you and me. Infact it is just you and me that Nest , People’s Pension, NOW, Cushon, Smart  and the dwindling number of  others who now dominate the workplace pension market – need to be reaching out to.

I am sure there are great apps for many of them, but I don’t see them advertised. When it comes to appware – if you’ve got it, flaunt it

Window shopping

The app store does indeed allow you to download the LifeSight app and you can window shop for others there and at the other place.

But the app we really want is the one that lets us see all our pots in one place, at the “click of a fingerprint”. That app is still at least three years away according to people at the pensions dashboard.

Till then , most of us will have to continue to window shop, waiting for our providers to catch up.

The Flight of  the Pension Bee

While all this app development isn’t happening, the Pension Bee continues to pollinate the imagination of the clicking classes with a truly excellent app which doesn’t require us to be a member of the LifeSight gated community.

Critics of the Pension Bee would do well to remember that people vote with their finger prints these days. While you may not be able to join LifeSight, you only need a pot to be looked after by the Bee-keepers.

Shape up – or you may be shipped out. VFM includes a metric for “Quality of Service”!