Key findings
Our research shows that a significant 75% of DC savers aged 55 or over would find it helpful for their DC savings to automatically start paying them an income when they reach the point of retirement. 

Over 83% of these individuals would like their retirement savings to automatically start paying an income from State Pension Age or earlier, indicating a strong alignment with the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) ambitions for default decumulation solutions. 

When asked, people say that they’d like a portable personal pension which goes with them from job to job.

When asked, people say they want a pension dashboard to consult when they’re thinking about financing their retirement.

When asked , people said they wanted a pension from their pension.

I have now been working in pensions over 40 years and since I started out , I have seen the introduction of personal pensions as a mass market means of saving for retirement in a tax advantaged way, when they were launched in 1987, they were advertised as “portable”, they were sold as a pot for life. The vision of a lifetime pot is nothing new.

For the last 20 years, from the combined pension forecast to the modern commercial dashboards, we have been promised a way of seeing all our pensions in one place. The dashboard availability point is currently predicted to be 31/10/2026, Chris Curry says it may be before then, but enough can go wrong between now and then for me to not be holding my breath.

We have neither a portable personal pension or a dashboard, instead we have a plethora of pots and from these pots we want a pension. This is a tough ask. 40 years ago , there was a state pension supplemented by an earnings related pension. There was an occupational DB pension, which you got if you worked for the right organisation and qualified. There was a retirement annuity contract which paid you a pension through an insured annuity. There were DIY schemes for execs and small business owners . But for this generation

their DC savings  automatically started paying them an income when they reached the point of retirement. 

I learned of Hymans research sat in a roomful of older people at the Trades Union Pension Conference. This generation has yet to consider “drawdown” as anything but an anomaly.

“A significant number of people will not engage with their pensions”

This is an insight from Hymans’ research. That research suggests that three quarters of us do want to engage with a pension, we want to have one when we retire or have retirement thrust upon us. I engage with my pension every month when a credit to my current account arrives marked “pension”.

The research tells us that they simply want a one and done for me pension paid to them as they and their parents have expected since the advent of workplace pensions after the second world war.

Hymans research also shows that people favor having a retirement age to work to but the flexibility to trigger the payment of their pension.

What I find so encouraging is that the level of “don’t knows” for both questions is below 10%. That’s an incredibly high level of engagement with the questions. That suggests that these are the right questions, they are what people want to be asking.

This is why it is both sad and strange that so many people have swapped an occupational pension that they could take earlier than state pension age and paid out automatically when they asked it to, for a pot of money they do not know what to do with.

Hymans conclude with a plea to their current and prospective customers

We would encourage providers to really seek to understand their average member’s needs now and in the future.

A small number of the £1.2m employers enrolling staff into DC workplace pensions will pay to have a default decumulator for their staff – with the help of a major consultancy.

The vast majority will rely on the master trusts and GPP providers to come up with a default investment pathway that meets the needs of the majority of their savers.

While I agree that in an ideal world, the decumulator would be bespoke to the needs of the retiring population, the reality is that most DC schemes will be too big to be much more than “average“. We need defaults for the average person and this excellent, simple research from Hymans shows what the average person wants.

When it comes to pensions, there’s no harm in being “average”. Most of us want our pensions done for us, our major decision is not “how” but “when” we get our money. For most of us, we retire when we can afford to retire.