The BreakFast Sessions : The State of Retirement Advice with Ben Hampton, Standard Life Aberdeen
We were delighted this month to be joined by client Ben Hampton, Head of Digital Retirement Advice at Standard Life Aberdeen.
With a career to date in several areas of pension provision, and now heading up the delivery of SLA’s innovative hybrid retirement advice service, Ben was well placed to help us shine a light on many of the issues around the important, but often neglected, topic of retirement finances and advice. Do we value advice enough? Why don’t we engage with our retirement finances early or often enough? What are some of the common misconceptions about advice and retirement finance?
We had a wide ranging discussion, the video of which you can watch here or at the end of this article.
Here were three of the stand-out observations from our chat:
1. Perception
To provide a clear picture of the steps ahead we must alter the perception of pension planning. Accessibility and awareness have always been key problems for the industry - it can be seen as stuffy, expensive and elite. It also doesn't do itself any favours by relying on the word ‘advice’, which can often feel too intangible, and be confused with the ‘advice’ you get from friends, family and the internet.
2. Emotional acceptance
Everyone has to take individual responsibility for the future. People are living longer, and many want to keep working (even if they don’t have to) and they are reluctant to address retirement as a reality.
Until we experience emotional acceptance we won’t be able to retire. That ‘penny drop’ moment happens when the conversation shifts from the defensive to the aspirational and we start to ‘solve the emotional to tackle the functional’. We can’t make good financial decisions until we’ve addressed how we feel about retirement and imagined the kind of life we want to live.
3. Embrace technology
It should be fast, easy and cheap to manage our pensions. Technology is a route to this.
Digitisation leads to better customer experience and with convenience comes a higher take-up. With auto fill we can work on forms much faster (let’s face it, who remembers their national insurance number?) It’s also much easier to give information digitally, than trying to spell long names over the phone. For speed, convenience and control the industry must embrace technology.
In closing
Standard Life Aberdeen are leading the charge in making advice more affordable, accessible and effective. CreateFuture have supported them over the last few years designing the proposition, features &, user experience, often through fast-paced, collaborative sprints, testing and rapid, iterative design.
If you’d like to discuss what this approach could do to accelerate your business, please get in touch.
Through our BreakFast sessions, we talk to leaders in the Design and Innovation industry. The talks are filmed live. We talk about their industry and business, we learn from their experience and create an open forum for questions and new ideas. Visit createfuture.com to sign up for the next session and to watch recordings of the previous talks.