Peter Nicholas suggests a simple pensions rebrand could alter attitudes to retirement savings.
This morning, as I do most mornings, I picked up the discarded, now defunct scratch cards littering my front yard. Remnants of broken dreams, maybe even retirement dreams of the customers of the SPAR next door.
At a pensions conference some years ago there was a presentation on how people in different countries expected to fund their retirement.
Apparently, in the US the failsafe fall-back is entrepreneurship. Somehow, as if by magic on reaching retirement and the last pay check, never having run or operated a business previously, many Americans believe they will start a business that will fulfil their retirement needs.
In Europe, and at that time I'm sure the UK was still in Europe, the hope is that an inheritance from a distant wealthy relative will miraculously materialise at just the right moment to fund any retirement savings shortfall.
Australians are more straightforward; despite the overwhelming low probability, there is a belief that a lottery win will drop at just the right time.
Whilst I can't vouch for the veracity of the research, the proposition is intriguing: that luck not pension planning will prevail.
Maybe the Australian example is largely correct. After a lifetime of substantial compulsory employer contributions with no requirement for employee contribution, the tax-free cash lump sum available on turning 60 may feel like a lottery win.
Yet it's the European preference I find most insightful, an unexpected inheritance.
Pensions clearly have an image problem. What if we rebranded them as your future inheritance?
Could this elicit different attitude and behaviours?
What would you do to protect your inheritance? If there was something you could do to increase it, would you? Would you take an active interest in where it was invested?
Imagine a new starter at your company. Rather than being given the pension scheme booklet on Day 1, they were given the details of their future inheritance and all the things they can do to protect it and grow it.
Annual pension benefit statements could become an inheritance countdown statement. The possibilities are endless. The bottom line is that language matters. If you want to connect with your members you need to make the message meaningful to them.
Maybe if I take this thought next door to the SPAR there will be less loser litter tomorrow.
Peter Nicholas, Managing Director & CEO, AHC.
