Scottish Widows is planning to ‘supercharge’ pension engagement as it launches a revamped app and TikTok channel in a bid to drive young people to take notice of their pensions.
The life insurance and pensions firm said it is investing £100million to improve its digital offering, including launching its TikTok channel ahead of ‘pension engagement season,’ This is Money can reveal.
As many as one in four people in their 20s aren’t saving anything for retirement, according to data from Scottish Widows, with 38 per cent of people not on track to save for their minimum lifestyle requirements.
Scottish Widows has rebranded its app platform, investing £100m to boost digital engagement
Jackie Leiper, managing director at Scottish Widows, told This is Money: ‘People are on their internet banking accounts almost every single day.
‘We know that pensions and investments get nowhere near that level of interaction and engagement from people.
‘The investment we’re making is to create a digital ecosystem and experience that allows people not only to look at their products with us, but actually to connect the accounts with other providers as well.’
Scottish Widows hopes by launching a TikTok channel, it can tap into viewers, especially younger people, who are interested in improving their pension and before it is too late to make a real difference.
Leiper added: ‘If you’re in your 20s, you’re not really thinking about retiring, are you? But actually, we know that people in their 20s and 30s can make the biggest difference by small steps that they take.’
Generally, people don’t really start to take notice of their pensions until they are in their 40s, Leiper said, ‘by which point they’ve got quite a short window to really make some real difference or take some real action’.
Working with TikTok, Scottish Widows found that searches for ‘#retirementplanning’ had increased 300 per cent in the first quarter of 2024 compared with a year ago, while ‘#retirement’ had increased 60 per cent.
Meanwhile, 81 per cent of TikTok users said they want to know more about personal finance, with a third actively searching for this content on the platform.
The ‘#retirementplanning’ tag had more than 10 million views in the first quarter of 2024.
Scottish Widows: Leiper says most people won’t expect a traditional firm to be at the cutting edge of digital engagement
Scottish Widows said young people could gain the most by engaging with their pensions early in life, arguing that if the auto-enrolment age threshold was lowered to 18 and the lower earnings limit was reduced, savers could add an extra £46,000 to the average future pension pot, an increase of 45 per cent.
‘This generation of people in the 20s and 30s aren’t going to have any of the gold-plated pension schemes that perhaps my generation have had, so the steps they can take now could really make a huge difference for them,’ Leiper said.
‘The TikTok channel is quite experimental, but it is showing that there is a demand there and that if we can go where the people go then that’s probably our best opportunity to make the biggest difference.’
On top of the TikTok channel, Scottish Widows is also updating its brand and app, including introducing gamification features which it hopes will help to easily explain difficult concepts to users.
Having launched just weeks ago, the firm’s compound interest in-app game has already seen 53,000 visitors, or one in five app visitors.
Leiper said its ‘beat the gap’ and ‘pension mirror’ games, meanwhile, have ‘had amazing engagement and really helped to simplify down the messages and help people make decisions more easily.’
‘The gamification team are miles ahead of our competitors and nobody else is doing this in the pensions and investment space, certainly in the UK,’ Leiper added, ‘most people wouldn’t expect to see it from quite a traditional company like ours.’
Scottish Widows is currently recruiting a full gamification team, with the aim of creating standalone games for everyone to use., as well as expanding its features to other aspects of its business.
‘Ultimately what we would be hoping that people do is actually start taking steps to close the gap they’ve got, so that they have what they need for retirement,’ Leiper said.
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