By Department for Work & Pensions

This report summarises research exploring consumer engagement and ways to increase public engagement with private pensions in the UK. It brings together findings from a rapid review of publicly available literature with intelligence from 6 expert interviews across the UK, Western Europe and Israel. This provides new insight and understanding into some of the factors influencing pensions engagement. The research highlights areas for further research and could be expanded in the future by seeking a wider range of expert interviews from across the industry.

The report firstly discusses the definition of engagement in the context of member interaction with pensions. The topic of ‘engagement’ appears to be one that has relevance and interest over many different fields and lessons can be learned from across a wide range of consumer sectors. Within the literature reviewed, the term is often used without a specific definition, but is variously attributed to cognitive, emotional, and behavioural components. The cognitive component involves the ability to understand pensions and the communications received about them.

Emotional engagement includes feeling connected to or ‘in control’ of your pension. And behavioural engagement includes actions such as logging into a pensions account and making decisions on products. Engagement is typically considered a positive aspect of consumer interaction. However, the literature reviewed did not explain how positive outcomes for consumers are directly caused by consumers’ engagement.

The report also discusses factors that can increase member engagement with pensions, which were the importance of communication effectiveness; information provision; and using technology. Communication effectiveness includes making information more visible, understandable, and relevant to members as well as taking a more ‘consumer-centric’ approach to communications about pensions. Information provision includes actively sending information about pensions to people, such as by emails or letters. Using technology refers to digital tools such as dashboards, interactive tools on apps, and generally improved online access to pensions information. This needs to be caveated with the understanding that the effectiveness of technological tools depends on the level of members’ digital literacy.

Source Gov.uk