There are many different kinds of vulnerability affecting pension savers, as Pensions Expert editor Nick Reeve discovered on a recent trip to Edinburgh.
This weekend sees the final few days of the Edinburgh International Festival, a massive and joyful celebration of live music, theatre, comedy, poetry, and dance.
Earlier this month, I wove my way through street performers, leafleteers and punters to a very different kind of venue: Standard Life’s Innovation Lab.
In my mind, I was expecting a room full of actuaries in lab coats, surrounded by test tubes and apparatus that could somehow help come up with a more accurate model for longevity. Perhaps I’d watched too much confusing alternative theatre.
Instead, Standard Life has transformed part of the ground floor of its Edinburgh headquarters into a high-tech meeting facility and training centre for its staff, as part of a wider effort across the company and its parent, Phoenix Group, to improve the support it gives end customers.
Angela Scally, vulnerable customer lead at Phoenix Group, showed me some of the ways in which staff are shown the challenges that some of their clients face. This ranges from special glasses designed to imitate visual impairments to a ‘glove’ that replicates arthritis.
A virtual reality presentation shows an interaction between a call centre operator and a customer seeking support on early retirement while struggling with mental health issues.
As the Pensions Commission’s work on retirement income adequacy gets under way, these experiences brought home the wide variety of problems that pension savers face that may affect their interactions with providers – and their ability to save for a pension or to retire.
A pensions administrator may not be able to do much to help a customer’s visual impairment, but understanding it and having the resources to adjust how important information is delivered could make all the difference to that person’s ability to retire comfortably.
I’m aware that Standard Life and Phoenix aren’t the only companies doing this kind of training, and I would be interested to hear of other initiatives in this area. There are many different kinds of vulnerability – some of which I hadn’t previously considered – so the more we can do as an industry to make pension-related communication more inclusive, the better.
Nick Reeve is editor of Pensions Expert.
