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Avenue Cuba, North America
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friday morning well done everybody getting through
another week and uh thank you for choosing to uh to round out your week uh spending some time
with myself and and ben so before i get into introductions again and introduce ben and
allow him to introduce himself in his role um thank you so much for joining us on the breakfast
session i'll go through some of the housekeeping for um if you've if you've not joined before um
we've been running these for a couple of couple of years now actually uh offline and online um
and has some kind of great guests over the time we we invite people who are really kind of making
changes in them in the work that they're doing in brand marketing and so st men's is coming
across this between marketing and proposition development um and uh so i'm delighted to delight
to welcome ben today we're going to get into the chats in them in a minute and we'll probably
run for about half an hour to so 40 minutes and it absolutely will be an opportunity to ask
questions so please put those into the kind of q a my colleague scott will be grooming the questions
and uh we'll take a break halfway through at least for questions and then we'll ask for a few more
at the end so please please do kind of fire your hard and tricky questions through to ben because i
don't have to answer them so i've got an easy ride um we are recording hope everybody's okay
with that we record so that we can share it online afterwards so if the drop off or you
want to share it with your colleagues please please feel free to do so you can find links on
createfuture.com and on youtube um and um i think i think that's probably it we don't have to
do the fire drill actually i have to say i am annoyingly got a delivery collection sort of
coming and so there's and i'm in the flat on my own there's every chance that could come in
the next 20 minutes so apologies in advance if that happens there's nothing i can do about
it you'll have to talk among yourselves um great okay um so with all with all that out
of the way um uh welcome to to to ben so uh we've had a number of guests on this uh some you
know from adidas and penguin london house and um penguin yeah penguin expedia in the past and so on
and i'm delighted to add another um client they're not always clients but i'm delighted to have a
client this time uh in standard life uh standard life advice and and ben who we've worked with ben
and andy for the last couple of years i'd say now yeah on and off over the last couple of
years specifically helping um to develop the thunder life advice proposition so i'm delighted
to join us we're going to talk about everything about the canola time of the vice space um
before we get into that um ben you want to introduce yourself and uh maybe a little bit about
your career and and how you got to where you are and then just tell us a little bit about the the
proposition as it stands today yeah look thanks nick in the morning to you and morning to everyone
thanks for thanks for coming along um yes of ben ben hampton i work at starlife aberdeen and i lead
depends what's our retirement advice business and that's really a it's a hopefully an innovative we
think it is and a kind of growing hybrid advice offer so it's a combination of a human human
relationship is really really important but driving digitization and codification to
kind of make it more accessible that's what that's what we're trying to do we're trying to
increase affordable access to financial advice for people probably at the time when they need
it the most which is about retirement and what's next and how we deliver a plan for them for
both the finances and really for what i call the life they've not yet lived there's some of
those emotional aspects which we'll come on to so um yeah from aren't you down in london actually
for the benefits of home working i'm at my um my wife's parents house we've been down to travel
a bit of virtual working but based upon edinburgh despite the accent uh from hull in yorkshire
um and i've been fortunate i've had a kind of a decade of experience working on advice workplace
pensions wealth management at starting life aberdeen and the various guys we've been in um
from strategy roles proposition roles distribution marketing and then kind of advice running running
a kind of advice business i've been fortunate probably in the kind of experiences i've had i
think i've loved being on the front line i was spent time with him workplace employers and
the the kind of pension scheme so going to lots of different businesses and companies was
fascinating and then i was fortunate to have a stint as executive assistant to our ceo in the uk
and europe business uh look fascinating see how um executives make decisions on direct decisions
sometimes um but it was fascinating nonetheless seeing how business runs end to end and the
advice proposition is mainly a d2c offer isn't it at the moment yeah certainly so look we the key
thing for us and we'll probably cover this is kind of talk some of the questions you want to cover
next and it's it's really about helping customers and actually trying to do that direct consumer
themselves and it's it's in the challenge for this advice isn't well known so it's really about kind
of direct consumer whether that's referrals from other parts of our business or partners actually
acquiring them directly through various different forms of paid acquisition actually and that's
kind of exciting but also challenging at times so it's kind of making it all stack up well you
know i'm just because we know each other a little while you know i'm actually i'm kind of i'm really
invested in this this one of kind of retirement and and some of the challenges that are facing
the industry and it was an eye opening for me um over the last working with yourselves and
people like hyman's robertson another client who um really you know kind of
championing trying to get people to to engage with um their you know their
retirement planning and more and you kind of think it's something in the dim and distant
future you really don't need to worry about and i was definitely in that camp um a few things
happened to me kind of a couple of years ago i got i got pneumonia a couple of years ago got ill give
me a bit of a health scare got me thinking about like kind of provisions for for um for thinking
ahead and obviously i'm kind of advanced it was i was 47 yesterday so from the advancing years and i
read a great book called the 100 year life as well which kind of got me um definitely got me thinking
in different terms about it so all of those things have really been an education to me in terms of
um the importance of getting this right but also if we're going to touch on this the fragile state
to be honest of a lot of people's kind of finances um when they um and it's not just down to their
own individual responsibility you know there's a lot of practices that contribute to that now
it's such an important part of people's lives you would expect there to be a very healthy market
for good advice for this i read a great quote just very coincidentally this morning someone
said there's a huge market for poor advice um but you know the market for good advice you'd
expect people to be knocking down your doors to get this disorder but but that's not always the
case so you know why why do you think the uptake of advice is sometimes quite quite low um you know
does it does it potentially have an image problem you know what's what's contributing to this uh
slightly head in the sands uh attitudes sometimes yeah a lot i think i think all those things are
really relevant um i think what i'd probably start with saying perception is reality so
that undeniably perception plays a key part and let's be honest the fact you're asking that
question and it's kind of a credible question illustrates the challenge um i think it's
personally i think it's an accessibility and awareness problem let's say rather than a problem
we're all positive people on a friday morning an opportunity that that's good but i think the
industry doesn't help itself in the industry the word advice means something very specific with
standards rules actually huge safeguards for for the consumer compared to doing something to learn
do you think they're a bit off-putting yeah the real world in everyday language advice is quite a
quite a general term i think if if everyone on the webinar now could just just pause for a second and
think the last time someone either you asked for it or they gave you or someone imparted you some
advice from a friend or a neighbour and depending on your friends sometimes you don't ask for that
advice um but they give it anyway none of you will have probably had any high expectations regarding
the quality and the professionalism of it to consumers advice really just means help and
support i don't i just don't believe customers naturally differentiate between the regulated and
non-regulated forms that support even the quality that support varies wildly so do you think given
that you know the advice is quite a broad term do you think that is but but in in general parlance
but then in terms of a product offering it's quite specific you know regulated do you think there
may need to be maybe more of a spectrum of the way that people engage with around advice yeah that's
not something from the informal and self-serves through to you know sitting across a desk with
somebody yeah i think people ultimately don't know don't know what it is and i think if we come
back to the industry talks about an advice gap so we know the demand for help and support if
we talk about the retirement that we're talking today we know that you said it's a big part of
your life you thought it's the kind of thing you think i might get a bit of help here for big
decisions but this is a supply side problem when it comes to professional advice and i think
that accessibility part of that gap some people can't afford to get financial advice
because because of the supply side advisors have been able to move upstream
and say we need to set my minimum wealth so those minimum requirements exclude people and i
think these forces create an accessibility gap and actually i think there's huge interest in
that bit and the progress has been made in making advice more accessible more affordable what we've
done in terms of that hybrid offer of digitization and codification but with a human center and
going back to your point about different different executions i think that's really important because
for us we had an ambition to do it without a human and it just didn't work the
reassurance the confidence the friction the commitment cliff just didn't
work so you know we pivoted quite quickly i think for other settings and different
life stages the human could be a pen and a pen in the bun um actually for some people that
don't want that interaction i think the markings markets really hot enough royal london acquired a
fintech firm called wealth wizards i think they're really impressive and that's a potential game
changer for them m g wealth i've just announced plans to create a hybrid advice officer look
that can see a return from the man from the crew but digitally so that's fascinating i think all
those things are only positive for the consumer but i think the bigger challenge which i
think is what your question links to nathan is the gap around perception and awareness that
awareness part of the advice gap means people aren't aware what advice is what it gives them and
why people like them should even consider it so i think that does drive an image challenge and it
comes from a lack of understanding of what it is so that's the industry's challenge to solve it's
not on the consumer to be able to work out what it is we need to make it easier to be accessible
understand it but i think the challenges we talk about a lot it feels intangible and for some it's
solving problems or realizing opportunities they didn't even know they had before that relationship
so it's very difficult for them to imagine what value they're going to get from it and just
even the example you get about health point so many examples triggers of some life event
it forces you to take that step back oh god and then that type of things and that i think
that's really key but i think that awareness gap is something i think everyone needs to work harder
of different channels will help that helps the accessibility but if people don't know what it is
or why it's good for them and what could help them that's a that's a challenge we have to close is
that important is that influence your marketing then or when when and where you try to engage with
people in a different way rather than just saying you know what those triggers triggers are and
and and broken broken your messaging down a bit more yeah i think andy takes the credit for this
really i think in terms of we tried to think of two segments and we called them not not that
imaginatively advice seekers people that know who what advice is are probably further in the
consideration process closer to the buying line um but the comparing stuff but that market's
quite small the market we've had more success with arguably is what we'd call the retirement
researchers people that have know they've got a problem don't quite know what the problem
is they want to be proactive in solving it and it's then how we can help them to kind of take
look low commitment actions and nudge them along so you know bizarrely we've just started doing a
um a retirement guide a guide so it feels really traditional for what something i've said is
that i'm trying to be innovative but we've put a purchase funnel around it indigenously and
people are just engaging with it on facebook so that kind of channel point is is absolutely
key but yeah thinking of those two different segments unfortunately the advice seeking segment
is actually small because of um because of that awareness gap the need for advice is huge but
people wouldn't necessarily pop themselves into that segment unfortunately they're more in that
they they're not starting the research and yeah um you've actually what would you say is the
buying line what typically is the buying line in terms of the people that you're advising then you
use that tail that's quite interesting it's tricky it's tricky and one of the things probably um
to touch on is so um responsibility is going to the individual right responsibility is going to
the individual and that's well documented right documented around um people living longer stuff
being passed from the employer to the to the individual we were talking more about that but
the one thing we see that people don't really talk about is the choice of when and if to retire when
and if like fascinating absolutely fascinating right and that's a huge decision and i think about
the closest to the final and we've had a customer that keeps coming one of the planners was talking
about it it keeps coming back and the guy keeps saying i think i need to keep working i just need
to keep working because the finances are a bit and the financial planner keeps on the same so
it's like let's let's always have a moment with ourselves we both know you can afford to
retire yeah we both know you don't want to and it's that bad so i think it's to me it's one
of the things it's that emotional acceptance and that's a really key step in it and so the buying
line for me is when you've got to that and i think it's when you can get confidence for something
that's intangible i think people have a penny drop moment where they go i can see a weight's off
my shoulders the weight's off my mind that's the closeness to the buying line but look for everyone
as anything you can move really close to it and something drags you away so the skill is focusing
i think reacting from a marketing perspective on intent what are those intent triggers and i think
it's a considered purchase so we use a lot of kind of lead nurturing journeys um whether it's email
or other aspects to just nudge people back further along it but retirement advice can take six to
twelve months sometimes for people to make that decision it's not a short quick fast purchase
sometimes i wish we were selling chocolate bars but it's so that advice joe needs to go through
and get you you come through could take six to twelve months but i think what i get a sense
of this and i've been working with you you know people really ideally should be considering
this earlier in their lives and and starting the research as you as you said and you certainly
want to engage people earlier because the earlier they are the more um the opportunities are there
are two effects affect their outcome but for you i think that that that that raises a challenge and
that becomes quite a long life cycle then or a kind of a long relationship you know as opposed
to you think of an ifa someone maybe walks in through their door you know you set a session
up then you work with them for for a couple of weeks over a few sessions and the plans give them
back you know but actually what we're saying is you maybe need to change that to to a longer life
life cycle that's quite a shift i think isn't it yeah i think i think the longest lifestyle has
two parts one is while you're almost coughting and kind of deciding if you can work with each other
but what we're trying to do as well now is we kind of use the first how do you help people get ready
for retirement because if i said to you nephilim are you retiring the next 12 months you've kind
of got that's a big quite yeah don't tell me jessica but i'm thinking about it yeah yeah
well um you don't look old enough as i said um yeah the big big question it's quite a commitment
to say well yes or no but if i said to you you're probably going to retire in the next five
years a lot of people say yeah hopefully probably i'm hoping i'll do this the conversation
changes from quite a defensive conversation of well i don't know probably not to yeah
aspirational and you get emotional bits i think we're trying to change that
conversation that doesn't mean about gotta be careful how you frame it because
actually if we start framing about how much income you might have in retirement
in five years time it's still a long way away if you all think back to five years ago in your
life look i've got two kids now i didn't have a five year period like it's quite a long time and
i think that's a that's the challenge i think it's about then having other things to engage them
with and i think one of the things we've talked about is your phrase which i love which i've
stolen and we've done some other stuff with this but you know you've got to solve the emotional
to enable the functional finances but i think that's that's the key i can't even remember
saying that but i'm glad that you might start but no we're gonna definitely touch on some of
that i might yeah i i do remember where we came from and it certainly came from i think a lot of
the customer interviews we gave where as you say a lot of these kind of a lot of them were kind
of known uh issues and motive reasons people would give them but of you could see words just
come on people maybe just not given feeling they had permission to retire yet when the when the
finances were really really in place it was it was really really interesting and we're definitely
gonna i mean we always we talked a little bit about the when and if they're gonna retire i
think we'll come a little bit later on to the how because that's definitely changing like how are
you resign and what what time looks like i want to say a little bit on them on the the negative
side i guess which is the is the numbers you know it's been referred to you know i remember
the scene the phrase like a pensions car crash like sort of like waiting to happen you know in
terms of you know people are saving enough um state state finances being stretched you know the
state of um you know the shift from uh you know to um the yeah just just the performance
of kind of um pension funds as well and all of the and then yeah under savings
so all of these things and aging life longevity and increased health and all these
things come together now people individuals do have a responsibility to to save themselves so
why do you think people don't i mean you know and that that covers why aren't people from their
20s through to their 60s what what psychologically things come into play yeah i think we're all
human human nature we look at the experiences we understand so you probably look to your parents
right so you can look at your parents and other people how they've retired and set for the future
and look let's be honest previously people were packed off with a carriage clock some retirement
drinks and a guaranteed wage and retirement from their employer so if that employer invested the
money badly or people live longer than expected um or if the actuaries said live too long
um you know the employer footed the bill um that responsibility is all in the consumer
so i think it's a challenge of that's only exacerbated by a 100-year life point people
living longer hopefully in good health as well lots of people retiring now will probably
spend as much time in that retirement as they did in their working life but don't
think of that that's that's genuinely crazy you know have that period of time and it might
be slower pace or a different person hopefully a good proportion of it is in good health but maybe
not all of it is all those dynamics but all that's kind of exacerbated by this extra choice that
you have and i think the big challenge i see is whether it's the 20s or whatever and we're going
to come to automatic enrollment let's help that people don't realize that responsibilities
on them it's too intangible to too far away so it's actually things like the power of
behavioral science you know you've got to opt out your workplace pension scheme now that's been
hugely successful but the next challenge is when those people arrive at retirement how are they
able to execute it effectively because they were used to not having a choice not having a decision
that we've got that guaranteed paycheck and it's that's really different and suddenly make those
decisions and then unfortunately i think the industry becomes quite pension-centric and look
we've done it when we were coming in for first guys i've i've seen it um so you know we're
all we've all got a collective responsibility but it becomes into more strange conversations
around what could you get for a pension you get some tax-free cash at the time so people are like
focus on that thing it's kind of a simpler concept but in isolation it's not really the question you
should be answering and advice has a much broader conversation so i think the challenge about
the the safety comes back to that awareness but also it's further ahead if you're younger well
you might be saying for a house purchase now it's it's it's priorities and i think you know the best
of i'd love people to turn around in years to come into card it was brilliant that i managed to um
someone that sat next to at work told me i should put as much money in my pension as possible type
thing what what a great piece of advice that was um and it's it's that kind of challenge but i
think anything you can do to show the impact of it and it's about confidence and i think removing
friction the industry adds lots of friction like even when you know we had a point when in lockdown
version one we hadn't built e-signatures yet yeah so we were asking customers to was asking one
of our support team you know i remember having to for risk i had to buy we had to buy her a bloody
shredder so that she could prove she had her i printing off amazon i just did it for my own
house i'll buy you it just do it we need to print these documents and then we were posting them out
and people were signing them return to the office you know friction and if you if you just if you've
got friction in your way it just puts you off especially if it's intangible so what we've tried
to do is bring the value exchange further forward show them what's possible i kind of try before you
buy you wouldn't buy a car without test driving it there was someone swinging someone from vanguard
and used that quote and it was it was brilliant i loved it um brilliant it's kind of you know
efficiently that advice a lot of people say you've got to you've got to you've got to pay
before we'll let you even see what you're going to get how do you remove that friction aspect to
make it you know for something you've maybe not had definitely probably not had given the numbers
how would you make it more real i think that's a great point i know you joined the the chat that
we have with pensionbee and i think that one of the reasons pensionbee was so successful is they
just kept chipping away to try and remove friction and make you know the migration of pensions and
consolidation of pensions so so seamless um yeah it definitely won me over and you know i mean yeah
when somebody once somebody makes your life easy and takes a problem away for you you start to
do a trust with them as well so and so we're going to touch a little bit on the advice like um
and that's actually dialing back a little bit to the hybrid offer that you that you're developing
so he talks a little bit about the fact that a hybrid offering can potentially bring costs
down for a consumer what are the other benefits do you think you know why why are you
investing in building a hybrid offer what what what can the technology do for you um and i know
you you still have the bank of advisors in 1825 yeah um face to face yeah so so what
can technology bring do you think to to advice for both benefits of consumers and and
to you to yourself as a business yeah a great question there's two parts two parts to what we're
doing with technology i think there's digitization and this is codification so let's let's look at
the digitization bit first i think within that aspect it's better customer experiences right some
things are just much better to do digitally and let's let's be honest so i use chrome right chrome
as my browser i'm annoyed when the website doesn't let me do autofill and fill in my personal details
when i'm buying something for the first time right it's annoying lots of information you're capturing
from a customer from a vice president in a fact find some of it is what i call the hard facts
that are boring unfortunately i'm going to need your national insurance number at some point but
typing that in is much easier than reading it out and me typing it for you it's all little things
like that but you know planning with your partner having to spell the name i wanted to do his call
and the advisor god bless him and the customer lived in north allerton so i'm in yorkshire i
know that's from and he had no idea he couldn't misheard it and it was just this bizarre 90
seconds of really awkward conversation because sometimes it's easier to give data digitally
sometimes it's easier to give it keep it verbally so the technology can kind of do some of those
things it can make it much more convenient right let's be really honest the technology has to make
it more convenient than a traditional business where you have to go to someone's house or you
have to go to someone's office exacerbated by the lock down on the pandemic stuff anywhere but
there's that aspect and the other aspects then is speed and we haven't got that perfect yet we i'll
hold my hands up we've got to keep working on that in terms of driving so because we've got things
that aren't perfect and bits where you cover it goes from fully automated to a bit manual and all
that breaks in the process but the speed could be a good thing linking to convenience because
you can do it anytime so that genuinely can be convenient but then from it from a kind of low
in the cost perspective you've got more control you can bring more standardization
you can bring more repeatability in but i think the other thing you actually
get is you should get better conversations with the consumer you know rather than me chit
chatting with you about the weather or your dog or your amazon delivery that's coming
or whatever delivery is coming you need to build rapport the real way you build rapport
and financial planning is getting into those aspirational hurts and fears conversations and by
us capturing a bit of information online digitally consuming some of that in an advice engine
we enable our financial clients to have that conversation earlier that's how you build rapport
having that valuable conversation earlier and i think that i think that's key so it kind of
covers that whole spectrum of convenience for the digitisation convenience in the sense that
some things are easier just to do digitally than in person um or over the phone verbally
and i think then the other aspects then become around the speed the consistency
the bringing value forward but then there's a risk angle right there is a risk angle
advice is really regulated people have um our second largest function always an interest
understandably the advice is perceived to be risky or actually it's got lots of controls around
it so that standardization can help that that's really important that'll happen for any industry
i think the closest thing i was thinking about is like pharmaceutical or kind of a health care
um i think it's like babylon health actually is a really interesting thing that's that was done
because similar dynamics speaking to an expert but how have you tried to either triage or oh kind
of i don't know do a bit of it up front you get to know the digital body language by looking at what
the customers do in advance it's the equivalent of me looking out the window in the car park in
the advice firm and saying right he's arrived in that car or i'm looking at the lady's jewelry or
i'm looking i'm not a thief even though i'm from hole i promise uh i'm looking at his watch it's
kind of but you've got you you'll be building some social you've got to be careful from unconscious
bias but you're building some clues and cues digitally you can do a lot of that that could
suddenly mean a more targeted better meaningful relevant conversation and that's what it's about
because if i said to you right at the start it's intangible i don't know what i'm getting you can
get to the heart of the matter it gives confidence do you ever be able to take the human out of the
loop i think for certain types of advice right at retirement on the onboarding i'm not sure
it's as easy as we think at the minute um i'm not saying you can't you know again it's fascinating
watching vanguard coming to this market they've been doing it in the us for eight years they've
had that background of it whereas some of us are doing it for the first time that i saw richard
was on m g wealth partnering with someone that done yeah all these things you can all these
things have to be possible you don't believe you won't do it i think for us our focus now is in the
ongoing advice and i won't go into the technical detail but there's a type of review you do where
people's circumstances haven't really changed i don't see any reason why the machine and the
human doesn't need to be involved the machine can do it digitally can do it and then and the
engine can make the decision there's no human the question is do the customers perceive digital
to be free and i think the value is the person whereas actually what the technology is doing is
much more sophisticated than what one individual can do he's had lots of brains go into it
i think that's a really fascinating dynamic every industry digital is perceived to be
cheaper not as good well actually it can be significantly better in lots of cases
i think there's that perception as you say yeah you want um women rapport you want their
empathy and their trust and it just popped up and i can't open it up again that doug brodie was
just made the point that you know you won't build that rapport with a 28 year old trying to build
it with a 65 year old i think you kind of want there's that image of what i'm paying for
this you know i i want years of experience and a trust and knowing someone's been through
this before that that's a brilliant question um observation actually one i was speaking to when i
first came into the royal sports one of our first to first financial advisor was a young guy in his
early thirties late twenties um he looked young um and yeah but what he said when he used to go
and see your advisors first clients first to first especially when they were handed over from another
adviser to him that was older he would make sure he dressed very particularly so he would always
go suit thai always if you're seeing an older generation which wouldn't normally for different
p is fascinating because you're right people have a perception again of what's required and now the
reality is these people our advisors like one of one of our buses john and and the people who are
laughing at knowing look he looks really young and we use his face on it all the time so it's kind of
people might not appeal to that but the reality he spends all day every day speaking to you about
retirement he knows it better than someone that does it bitter here and there but look they're
the things that human biases that we all have one of the things we're also playing with is how
do you start to look at um how you might deploy a female customer with a female fan show planner
because you do see kind of stories of confidence we haven't we haven't done it as a choice yet but
we do make sure we when we use the the kind of um we use the human and digitally in the
sense of with the pop-up in the journey and it's in some random variation um but you know
we could test does it have a bigger impact with with certain people younger female male all that
difference so yeah just need to be all the chance to be more sophisticated it comes back again
that digital body language and the ability for we haven't talked about on the on the digital side
you get more data you get data from a structured format that you can analyze and actually
then it's how you use it and draw conclusions that's great yeah and we'll come and talk about
how you innovate but let's take a little break for a half an hour into for a couple of questions got
some great ones um liam was straight in there so really answered one of my colleagues um uh you
know is there a particular myth around pensions that you see pop up a lot that isn't true the
fun uh no um the the the they are fun the the one i would say that comes up all the time is
people have this concept of this of tax-free cash and what people either say it says i have
to take it and for some pensions is this for the majority of what pensions have now will
probably drive to the people on the call i've got and you don't have to take it you don't
have to take it in a wonder that's the big one people assume that or if i'm going
to take it i have to take the full 25 you're done you don't have to do that and that's not
great necessary from a tax planning perspective you should feed it in at certain times depending
on your other exhaustive income i think the third one then the more worrying one is you get
the other people it's um the phrase one of our advisors uses is intelligently misinformed and
it's it's not a criticism of the customers they've done that bit of research they are trying to cut
through all this complexity and then they said well i've heard about his tax-free cash i know
it's 25 and then they say can i take it every year like well no unfortunately not you've got a pot
or an allowance and we can spread it which is interesting it's kind of a little bit of knowledge
and i think you know the same as all of us it's like i was thinking when you're buying a washing
machine a washing machine was broken you're then suddenly an expert on spin cycles and all the but
normally you wouldn't be you're buying a duvet you know about talks it's industry jargon and it's
how do you how do you make sure from a financial advice perspective a pension protective retirement
perspective you can cut through and help customers make decisions the challenge i think is from
the industry pension providers give don't have to always give advice some do and it's how you get
that blend of decision support for help and help and support but um the difference between guidance
and advice for me is guidance can tell you what you could do the advice tells you what you
should do and i think that should is so important that that can make such a big difference you don't
have to do it but at least someone giving you an opinion that should be relevant and suitable to
what you're trying to achieve another question um from graham carmichael emoji um obviously looking
to get some tips um but yeah um what do you think ongoing advice will look like in a digital world
and we touched on this a little bit i think this idea of taking it from a an event through to a
service i guess you know and something that's maybe with you through some of these through
these through these life stages you know it is there a product there or a service to do we
think um and how much of a digital component might might there be to that in the ongoing service
just to yeah ongoing advice i think you know i think i think i think again different life
stages right so i think for us in in retirement and drawing down an income and that lincoln can
move up and down based on the performance of where it's invested i think it is important
to to kind of have an ongoing service right the nature of those touch points could be quite
different and that's why we're kind of thinking about actually what we would call rather you know
advisors have to make some meet certain rules and make sure they can justify the ongoing
advice for you this is maybe sometimes whether the reputation is bad because sometimes nothing
really changes but you've got someone on hand to deal with it if it does and what we want to try
and do is throw away because of the technology we've got a greater view of when it's more
likely to be a significant change it's not like ai or anything it's just going with planned
out you're planning to spend extra money for your golden weighing anniversary you're planning
to do part-time work and actually you think you're gonna stop in three years so you know
there's these more uncertain events i think what we want to try and do is dial up or dial down
the the kind of the nature of the interaction because something it's sometimes a one size fit
all well nothing's changed we're still going to come and speak to you because that's how we're
justifying our service whereas actually really if we can justify ourselves to make sure the plan
is up today i think one of the questions to quote that i've kind of got in my nuts which i love
retirement does not equal pensions i am absolutely honest with that i totally agree and i think it's
how do you manage those things because things can change in your life and but i think there's a more
opportunity in the ongoing service to do digital stuff but the issue comes back to what we talked
about before around do people think that human is the value bit and like we're genuinely having a
conversation around um do we need to slow it down you know you might have already worked out the
answer from a data capture consume the information nothing's really changed we know the plan's
still suitable and appropriate and ongoing should we put a false kind of we're going to wait
to look at it i'm going to come back to you with your updated report in a few days almost to kind
of a bit of theatre now we're not we're not trying to mislead customers but that actually perversing
where it gives more confidence so we're trying to look at things that they might be completely
flawed thinking might be completely flawed we're just trying to think of some of those
kind of different opportunities potentially i think he does riffing a little on reese nielsen
off of some questions recover some of his earlier points but i think you know he was saying you
know um retirement doesn't need for pensions and vice versa um but there's a question that i
think about you know i guess the appropriateness of the products that there's the advice that you
can offer you know can given the complexity of of what retirement is now you know no two
retirements are alike you know is the advice products fit for both can you can you cope
with all of this um you know the diversion possibilities another products behind the
advice you know still appropriate these days to do do you think for the for the fast changing
nature of what retirement is today yeah i i think the kind of underlying products and the
underlying regulations haven't really innovated a lot i think the regulator knows that they've
had a few call for kind of inputs you could probably argue that the rules are analog
rules for a digital world uh if i'm honest so it's how do you how do you deal with that i
think the product set hasn't changed i don't think that's necessarily a problem because what you
need to have is a broad enough view that pension every time doesn't equal pension you know what
we're trying to factor into a retirement plan is part time working and maybe you've got
something you're looking for some rental income maybe you're going to have an
inheritance or downsize in the future these things aren't financial products
but they're going to have such a driver on um the overall where you ship that income
that you take from a product or invest money is absolutely key so i think it i think it does
vary i think there could be more innovation inclined products i think guarantees have a role
to play um which they haven't for a long time people have moved away from annuities potentially
they might think they'll come back um but i think the other thing says you get your state
pension right your state pensions your underpin but it's how you deal with that bit that
we call the bridging period i think that's where our service is really strong that kind of
period between before my state pensions come in i might be part-time working so i've got a source of
income what's the most tax efficient way to access my savings my life savings and kind of i kind of
drive that out we've got so many great questions um and we've already gone wildly off scripts
but uh no no we really had the scripts but still i do want this a couple what i do want to cover
because this again a particular bugbear of mine um is marketing and the marketing to the
over 50s and the way that over 50s are represented in marketing and it's not just in
financial services but financial services have typically been pretty bad at it so the the over
50s um have 70 percent of the wealth in the uk and i remember reading a couple of years but
only five percent of marketing spend is directed at them so that for one they were massively
under served segment and then when you do see a lot of the messages it's normally about you're
going to get old you're going to get ill you're going to get you're going to die you know or
the only thing that's going to be of interest in your life is your grandkids now obviously
everybody loves but it's not the only thing that's going on in their lives how so what's
what's your view on you know how to engage in you know this this really important um and diverse
market and what did you learn i guess in terms of in your recent class of 2021 survey um about the
lives that these that this segment's living and maybe maybe maybe wasn't this you know what's the
stereo stereotypical trends yeah looks i'll i'll come to the class explain what the class of 2021
research is and kind of come into that i think just pick on your first point around the old piece
i think you've got to solve that emotional to enable the functional and the functional from the
industry the focus is very much that functional and i think because people hear directly
from their pension providers with honest let's be honest a pension-centric message it
risks coming across as old and i think one of the things we found in the research actually uh
the class of research was one in three people that were retiring a worry for that one and three
was the act of retiring they would then be be perceived to be old like that in itself was a
problem that that was putting them off that's that was a worry and then come back to that point
actually making the decision so i think from a kind of um an acquisition perspective one of the
phrases of the terms from adwords and google early retirement perhaps unsurprisingly is the one we've
seen an important search term when it comes to retirement advice and researching um because
it's probably got a typically more aspirational intent to get your retirement wish list and start
exploring that life you've not let live so i think we should be careful that we don't stereotypically
do something but i will caveat that with when i hate this um but it but it's cliche but it
keeps coming up and it's kind of i find it annoying right um but cliche keeps going up for
all i'm saying don't want to see people be seen as old don't want to have stereotypes honestly
everyone that we've not like from but so many people we speak to disproportionately
they say they want to buy a caravan it's like it came up some user testing right
at the start of the program and it just keeps coming up with customers now so i think all this
chat around portugal and green amber and red list and all that stuff well the whole industries
are struggling everywhere aviation oh the other gathering the caribbean motor motorhome is
booming for your money and caravans it's bizarre um so i think the overfitters are interesting
bunch they are old concerning how long they're expected to live and how long they could spend in
that next phase but look let's just look at that class of 2021 research because um what we did was
just for people to give some context to it was we we did some we surveyed people a thousand people
who would retired in 2020 not just a stranger and a thousand people planning to retire in 2021
and what we call a class of report so we'll follow the each year the sentiments their feelings
and the challenges of people retiring in those years there's cohorts all those classes like an
american kind of graduation type thing um and i have to be honest i felt really privileged reading
some of the the free text the bets and comments there was one of the questions for the people that
retired in 2020 we said what would be your advice to someone retiring in the next 12 months and
again advice not financial advice not regulated advice just tips hints and tricks and we had over
from a thousand people so it wasn't a mandatory question we had over 800 free text responses
so what conversion kind of response people were always willing to give their opinion i suppose but
it was so insightful there were so many things of um do it um you know positive stuff seize the day
type although i have to admit it was a personal favorite a beautiful type of um carpet diem rather
than carbonyl that was a that was a good one and but for me the biggest aspect was the emotional
element uh the positive anticipation but also that genuine apprehensions from some and the importance
of having a plan and a plan been across emotional physical and financial and the physical bits
about being active often health related but some of the things they want to do it's not like i'm
just gonna go you know gardening still comes up right there's still some stereotypical stuff being
closer to nature but there's lots of active stuff still coming up as well in terms of what they want
to do for the time but i think one element um you know it's it's so important just having because
of one part of it you have a few things within it and i think that's where we haven't really
touched them yet but part-time work is so key whether part-time work is and paid or unpaid
actually i think that's a really fascinating and fascinating thing because knowing whether you're
doing part-time work whether paid or unpaid for your finances and this is why i'm searching
for libraries including the financial plan and knowing if you do because you need it because
your finances to be planned at your time and plan to stack up and actually you might be doing it
because you need the money or you might be doing it because you can't afford to work full-time
because health caring commitments with grandkids potentially or other caring commitments or are
you doing the part-time work paid or unpaid purely for stimulation enjoyment and that
genuinely the paycheck is an afterthought and i think by having the financial planner and
the financial advice be able to know you look at that and you know the reason why if you know
the primary driver is that social interaction that purpose that mental stimulation well actually
it's the emotional aspect and you having that huge understanding and clarity and confidence gives
you freeing flexibility to act if you stopped enjoying it for anyways now imagine all of us
right we've all had days and i'm worried about my teacher and my team are on this call they're all
up there so if i'm about to do my head i'm gonna pack it all in imagine knowing you could just pack
it all in it takes the pressure off the stress and actually that was what a difference
that can make so part-time work for me is something that i think could make a huge
difference to consumers and the over 50s group the challenge i would have is i'm going to talk
on tuesday with the pension lifetime savings association the challenge i refer to employers
is i don't think employers are set up to do it i think they give it a bit of lip service that we
support flexible working we support the transition through this year that maybe maybe we know we will
see some more flexibility in the workplace um i think we're coming in we're coming up on time
and there's one couple of questions i want to um i want to get off pretty quickly i
think and then we'll um uh we'll close off with another couple of questions so one
is like um innovation you know uh is know i i genuinely feel what you guys are doing and
attempting to do is uh it's is you know it's innovative and pushing pushing the products um
is is there much innovation in your space are you seeing much innovation in your space and
and also how um you know any tips and tricks to to to to innovate in a in a quite a governed
and in any standard life let's just be honest you know of uh of an organization um yeah how
how do you innovate and you know and and who's what's driving innovation for you yeah let's
do the second part of that question first so i think it's about having the confidence to
be progressive having trust in each other that some things will fail and really importantly
acknowledging that they've failed it's not a blame game but it's so important to acknowledge do the
acknowledgement part because then you've concluded you've concluded that something was learned and
otherwise you end up going through a cycle and you say oh we'll do an idea that was pretty much
the same as the other one because you've not naturally concluded and looked at your data
enough so it does come down to materiality and knowing sometimes that you need
to break the rules a bit and look um you've worked with them some of my team
won't do that more than others and look i i love working with them but the challenge i
have is creating an environment to let them do it effectively because their intentions are always
based on ambition and progressiveness they're not trying to do something dodgy but it's kind of
how we navigate that large organization i think there's these kind of disciplines you want from a
startup that let's not pretend you are a startup in a big company you're not but you can you can
do some of the disciplines so i think things are put that put your offer in your customers
quickly listen to what they're saying and doing also what they're not doing do you use
testing do ux research we use a ux researcher which i think he's great but he god i used to
hit the meetings with him because he tell you this stuff and holds this mirror right in your
face and you're like oh please remind me chance david hamill yeah but but we i used to hate them
i mean my friendship but he doesn't he doesn't hold back the difference such a difference to us
that was really important i think look at their live usage is that digital boy language where it's
full story or other kit and look and for me having previously done client-facing roles i'm a massive
fan of listening to the practitioners that are on the front line on the cold face speaking to
customers every day but colleague and customer feedback loops are key i think the one challenge
i'd say the thing i observe is if you're listening to them sometimes they might get disengaged by you
then not suddenly some of them go on a backlog it doesn't mean that you listen to them but doesn't
necessarily mean you're going to immediately solve that problem but that feedback loop is absolutely
key and see things change i think the other thing i'm kind of learning at the minute it's a
really interesting challenge as we go through a different stage of maturity and some people on
the call get different stages in this process i think it's about the timing when is the timing
of your progressive idea or innovation pitched in terms of that stage of maturity or
what the competitive environment is doing so i would say it's about closing what
i would call the size of the belief gap or the credibility gap because sometimes the size
of that gap suddenly becomes smaller because a competitor has done it or actually because you've
made some other connected adjacent steps that suddenly make it seem more doable i would actually
say you have to be opportunistic so actually look and there's some guys on the phone from mmg
uh today i've said look m g are in here now what a big company what a great company they're
going to be all over this so i'm using some of that to agitate a little bit because i've
got that kind of bit of vanguard a couple of months before it's helpful the market's
going up and i think we're discussing things now that we probably brought up two years ago
and i wasn't leading the area at the time i was probably sitting there in the team kind of going
to be frank some of these ideas sounded fanciful like it was just not credible no one believed it
was possible and it was a distraction whereas now people inside and outside the team can
see given progress here here and here so if you can shut that belief close the belief
gap close the credibility can get your timing right i think that's what i would encourage look
yeah you've got to bring risk with you at certain points but i think everyone knows that it's just
trying to get the right right right challenge imagine the dependencies not giving you know no
free decisions so i'm a big believer in conscious decisions sometimes certain areas sign things
off and it's free there's no consequence to the decisions how do you put them as a consequence
of that decision this is the consequence and we'll still make the same one that
would have done if it was a free decision let's get a couple of questions dave's
asked a great one dave ward around esg environmental sustainable governments uh
and um yeah you know put your money um where it's gonna make a difference and um
you read an article recently indicate the public say one thing they want companies to act
ethically then act another way when it comes to the decisions they're making about their own
money um so is esg influencing um retirement decisions or where the money kind of goes
does it come up in those kind of conversations um you know and when it comes to ethical
issues is it is it a challenge for the advice market okay so um from a sound life aberdeen
perspective soon to be aberdeen perspective look we're massive massive fans of massive supporters
of esg we think it's hugely important from account we have large shareholders in companies we've got
influence really really important so it will move when i was in my kind of work place where i used
to spend time with employees in workplaces the challenge you've got is lots of people don't
even know they're in if they know the saving into a pension not for retirement is good they
don't necessarily even know they're invested the the delayed pass on the streets so making the
connection um between you still there nothing yeah so he was really still i was have i dropped off i
was just taking a question this where you should have written stars up a lot drops off the wi-fi
so really really really um really important but are they making that connection so i think it
comes down to do people is the investment the most important part for people and i personally
and customers we speak to it's not at the minute really honest that i think something will cause
those triggers and it is important and i think big institutions have a responsibility to drive
better outcomes for it but when you talk about the individual decision maker i'm not sure that
that's the immediate concern maybe you could have some clever kind of wizzy things for a different
younger generation on starting serving might be a way to appeal to them you have to make it tangible
again how they actually influencing the customers the company's decisions so i think for us at
retirement we've not yet seen it come through we could consider it some regulations you need
to kind of keep an eye on that kind of be talked about esg and choices but i think the the thing we
need to be kind of mindful of is it's more about mean retirement more than pension what it means
in your life all that kind of other aspects i think i think would have a more bigger impact than
the choice of investment decision but look we all want to feel well and fuzzy about ourselves but
we all convince ourselves we're all not rational right we'll convince ourselves well i'm
gonna buy that for me because it's good you know but it's a flawed argument for your
previous purchase that you've decided for so we just need to be realistic of that i
think i think we're all complex characters but institutions i think have a huge role to play
i'm not yet seeing it come through to the individual but that doesn't mean any work come
it's going to be what causes that trigger um um i think we'll nearly wrap up we always
ask everybody about um you know we strong believers and healthy happy teams you know
you can't get anything done you know unless you're kind of working well and working well
together you know it's a great future we we do a lot to try and you know work closely with
the clients and also to you know to invest in that you know teams um to keep them healthy what
have you been doing over the last 12 months you know it's kind of keep people um healthy happy
motivated and and and moving the product forward you know through through this period of disruption
yeah it's been it's been it's been funny like you know we were a co-located cross-functional team
i don't think uh let's all never never see each other in person for a year and all work from
home was probably top of our list for increasing productivity and innovation but i think the
guys have done really well there was initial friction about access initially but i think a
couple of things i think they did and i think what i would discover is how do you get the
impromptu and the informal that's the bit that's been hard to create and how do you recreate
that that's so powerful because the impromptu and formula the things that give you the boots
the coffee filter or wandering to the canteen it's the boost you get it's the laugh it's the
energy it's the great idea it's the connection how do you create that i think the nature
of being remote you have to effectively um have a little bit more formalities you've at least
tell people the time to turn up so it's by nature it's got a meeting invite for even the informal
thing so the guys doing great at the start which was we used a bit kit called were buy and we just
set up a a room that was called the coffee lounge and people could just wander into it down into
the video can't just have a chat 15 minutes 9 15 on a um on a couple of mornings in a week so
that was great but again it's how do you keep things fresh and it that those things were
on the course and the other thing we did was we've made sure we had time in the day tried to
increase well not to our meetings so if we get outside in the light you know most of the team
immersed in scotland that time period of light isn't long you know that lift and you know you
got to get out of the daylight so there's all those aspects so i think we've done those things
i think going forward the really hard thing is people have got different preferences
now like some spent on live stage want to want to work from home some want to be a desperate
to be in the office i think we've all been really cognizant of what do other people think and avoid
any unconscious bias i have a massive fear of like suddenly seeing this meeting that will be
four people in the office sat at desks within earshot of each other having to go on a mute
on teams with one other person at home because four were in the office and one are at home and
actually the four in the office thinking why hell if we come in so i think if you're really clear
about for what environment for what tasks can you kind of solve and i think being really organized
when the right people are in the environment in an office or not so i think sprint cycles could work
quite well for that about certain days certainly you're in i know you normally work at
home but come in for this that's right i think i think everyone's doing fantastically
well i think people have been really innovative but it's been a drag as well let's
not kid ourselves it's not having some negative impacts but i think overall people well i've been
looking to see more of the kids i have to admit i've got you know nearly two nearly four year old
that's been that's been great right well look it's been a fantastic chat i um it's just a great topic
i could keep chatting but we're running to the end of the time so i'm gonna say thank you and i'm
sure everybody will join me in in that as well um we uh we will type a summary of this
up and and uh will go on as a blog post um if you wanted to just kind of recap on on
stuff as well and then the video will go up in a few days as well um we'll share share that
around um yeah but for now uh just thanks again on a friday for for ben for joining us
and thanks to everybody else who came uh and yeah a couple of things coming up in the
chat so thanks for that's really appreciated um have a great day everybody um announcement on
the next one i think we're planning to do a name these probably every kind of couple of months
and actually we bring in some other different types of chat so we're we're lining up one on
co-design with the ulster university so keep an eye out for that that's coming up soon um so
um but for now thanks thanks uh thanks again ben yeah thanks everyone that's really good good
to see you and hope your package comes and uh yeah thanks for that yeah thanks very
much again everybody enjoy your weekends you
