Why the burden for financial education is increasingly falling on employers’

Jonathan Watts-Lay, Director, WEALTH at work comments in WSB on the research he had conducted. From over 100 firms surveyed, we found 88% considered that professional retirement planning – including financial education – was crucial for their employees, especially if they were offering retirement products from the scheme itself.

Jonathan Watts-Lay comments: “If you are offering things in your scheme, then you absolutely need to make sure you have got the resources in place so that people know how to implement it and they know what they are buying.”

Watts-Lay also noted that there was a danger employees could be left in limbo under the current system.

“Employees could go to Pension Wise. But Pension Wise cannot actually tell individuals, your members, your employees, exactly what they should do, so it would not be unsurprising for them to refer back that individual to the pensions department or employer. But of course when they go back to the pensions department, what is the pensions department going to say that is really that different from what Pension Wise is going to say.”

“So you can see this kind of limbo situation where an individual thinks well hold on a minute, I’ve been to Pension Wise, I’ve spoken to my pensions department but nobody has still told me what I should be doing,” he concluded.

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