Bravura were delighted to be part of the team to win two of the four awards on offer: ‘People’s Choice’ and ‘Eureka – Best Innovation’ for its ‘Act Your Age’ financial age comparison tool, at the 24 hour Pensions Dashboard TechSprint event held over the 12th and 13th of April. The first award was voted for by the seven other teams taking part and the second award, by a panel of experts.

The event, coordinated by the Association of British Insurers (ABI) and hosted at Aviva’s Digital Garage in Hoxton, London, brought together over 20 leading technology firms with consumer groups and industry experts to develop the best ideas for how pension dashboards can revolutionise retirement planning for ordinary pension savers.

Our Bravura delegates were paired with representatives from True Potential, a financial services and technology organisation for IFAs and My Future Now, a digital pension consolidation service. Using the Pensions Dashboard prototype unveiled by the Pensions Dashboard Project Group on Wednesday 12th April as a starting point, the participants worked overnight to develop their ideas.

Act Your Age initiative

The Bravura True Potential and My Future Now team’s award winning concept focused on improving engagement levels of dashboard users by using their data (including salary and current savings levels) to give consumers a “saving age” – to assess whether they were on-track to meet income replacement targets in retirement.

Natanje Holt, Business Development Manager for Bravura, explains the process behind the ‘Act Your Age’ idea:

“We used  design thinking to put the client at the heart of the solution and  focused on what we could do with the data from the dashboard and not just the dashboard.

We chose to see how we could improve the engagement in pensions for customers between the ages of 20-35. Instead of just focussing on people’s retirement we wanted to make it more engaging by making the information more relevant to the individual. The result was to inform people what their ‘saving age’ was based on their salary and current savings compared to the recommended income replacement ratio in retirement. So if you are 33 and your savings look more like what it should have when you were 28, your saving age would be 28.  If the customer was  below their age, they could apply one of four active steps to get closer to what their saving should look like based on their actual age. This could be a one off contribution, regular increases, a combination of the two, or an increase in contribution levels for a set period of time.”

The Pensions Dashboard

The Pensions Dashboard Tech Sprint was the closing event of FinTech Week 2017, a week-long event that brought together industry, government and regulators to discuss the issues affecting Britain’s FinTech sector.

When the final dashboards are unveiled in 2019, UK consumers will be able collate all of their pension information in one place and receive a projection of what their annual income will be in retirement. Dashboards will be available from a number of sources, likely to include financial product providers.

Speaking after the event, Bravura’s team of Natanje Holt (Business Development Manager), Jonathan Wileman (Product Manager – Pensions), Andrea Schwendimann (1 Year Technical Placement Programme) and Rob Gagliardi (Digital Propositions Manager) , commented:

“It was a fantastic event which showed what a group of strangers can achieve in one day if they are collaborative and open. Our approach to give people more information about their pension was to keep it simple – and keep it effective.”

You can read more on the Tech Sprint, the Pensions Dashboard and FinTech week 2017 on the HM Treasury website.

Pensionteam

About the author

Freddie Findlater

Marketing Manager – EMEA

Based in our London office, Freddie has 10 years of experience working with, platform providers, asset managers and technology firms in a consulting, sales and marketing capacity. Freddie works within the Bravura Sales and Marketing team for EMEA.

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