From guidance to guided? Rethinking retirement activation

I have been circling the same set of questions for months, following the new Pension Schemes Act (and turning 50!).

The Act gives us guided retirement, a duty to offer a default income solution for people who make no active choice. It is a good piece of policy. But it fixes the last mile. Adequacy is decided many years earlier, and no amount of clever design at the point of arrival changes what is in the pot when you get there. So where does intervention have the biggest impact? Is pot size the end-all, or do spending and purpose matter more? Do we need better education and engagement, or better defaults? And how might the Pensions Dashboard change all this?

This is not a new preoccupation. In October 2019, Chris Curry, Michelle Cracknell and I ran a roundtable with the Pensions Policy Institute on what needed to change to support people in later life. Our opening pitch was that Gen X, their children and their grandchildren would have to take personal responsibility for their own retirement income, and that with only 6% of UK adults using regulated advice, we needed a new way to engage people. That was seven years ago.

Since then, we have tried, failed and tried again, to work with the industry to reimagine the retirement experience. Hundreds of discussions, dozens of proposals and multiple proof of concepts, including one with Lloyds in 2024. Our breakthrough came through the Family Finance Hub proposition we built with Standard Life:  intergenerational engagement, using life moments such as putting a child through university as activation opportunities, all deliberately positioned as guidance to get people thinking about retirement. It’s been great to see both the employer and end customer engagement since. 

2026 has brought a marked increase in our work in this space. From supporting the design of a Targeted Support journey for retirement, to building a personalised retirement hub around the premise that retirement means genuinely different things to different people. We’ve also put real focus on attitudes and accessibility, including working with Plain Numbers on toggles for people less comfortable with numbers.

Alongside that has come a run of workshops. One, run by the Standard Life Centre for the Future of Retirement, made a particular impression on me. We were asked to write down our own ages and the ages of our children at different points in the future. What surprised the room was that the number which made people think hardest about their own choices wasn’t their own age. It was their children's. Just as we found with the university journey in Family Finance Hub, thinking about your children’s future can be a powerful trigger to make decisions about your own.

I’m confident in our experience helping people on the way to retirement, but what about when they get there? Adequacy isn’t only about the size of the pot. What people actually want to do in retirement matters too. I’m inspired by Chris Budd’s work bringing purpose into financial conversations through his Financial Wellbeing Pulse. Andrew Storey has been picking apart how the growing pile of retirement simulators and calculators is meant to fit together, which matters because, from where the customer is standing, it can quickly become a maze. And Catherine Foot continues to lead the policy debate on perhaps the biggest question of all: how do we activate these conversations in the first place?

What links all of this is a desire to rally the industry around better retirement outcomes. Through the Money Coaching Coalition, we’re looking to bring people together for a roundtable on Gen X and retirement. And, building on our work with TISA on investment performance disclosure, we’re looking to design and test a guided retirement prototype.

So, is helping people retire better an adequacy problem or an activation problem? Inevitably, it’s both. But we can put more time and energy into helping people with adequacy through better activation, much earlier in the journey. That’s what we want to explore next.