Watch this: the pension engagement good news story

Technology, AI, video benefit statements, and gamification are making things a lot more engaging.

I constantly hear the debate played out on how important pension engagement is or isn’t in a world of default solutions where people are defaulted into their workplace scheme default contribution level, and default investment strategy.   

I hear the challenge that it can’t be done – you just can’t get people to engage in pensions they just aren’t interested enough in. 

At the same time, I read this year’s Scottish Widows Retirement Report findings that 39% (almost 4 in ten) of people are not even on track for a minimum level of retirement income. So, it’s clear we need to do more to engage and connect with people about their pension savings and there is no doubt that tech is opening up new avenues to personalise communications like never before.

Personalised video grows engagement

The ability to produce personalised video content for employer clients and for scheme members has moved on massively in the past few years, delivering personalised content with nudging capabilities. 

Here are just two examples. 

Using AI to quickly turn text into avatar films – we’re talking moments – creates huge potential to both speed up the process and push down the cost of creating memorable, personalised films for schemes or events, for example.   

Employers can choose avatars that are suitable for their workforce, with a tone that conveys the messaging, and multiple languages to include everybody in the workforce.   

Scottish Widows produces these avatars in-house using software that offers 140 different languages, and their quality has vastly improved with ultra-expressive versions that look brilliant too. 

Some say it’s almost as easy as making a PowerPoint slide deck and while we don’t think about it like that yet, we know that more and more people are consuming videos on the go and these scheme level avatar films are a great way of sharing pension messages quickly and easily.

On-demand video benefit statements

Video Benefit Statements (VBS) have been around for a while now but what’s really improved recently is the on-demand personalisation. The latest technology generates the video at the point when it’s needed, telling the pension saver what they have now and giving them a projection of what they might have at retirement, with personalised, actionable nudges to help them manage their pension savings.   

Let’s say the nudge is to update a nominated beneficiary and then the pension saver goes ahead and completes this transaction on the app or desktop. When they run the film again, their newly generated film knows that their beneficiaries are up to date and moves on to give them a different nudge.  

Real time, on-demand videos like this really elevate the pension engagement story.

Gamification

Every one of them walked away knowing a bit more about pensions, some went on to track down lost pots, and download the Scottish Widows pension app. 

Over the course of 13 hours, the mirror was used on average once every one minute and 50 seconds, and more than 400 times in total. We’ve now started taking that kit to big employer clients to help engage their people with their pensions – gamifying pensions in a fun way. 

We are serious about gamifying pensions – or applying gamification techniques to pensions – and there are now a host of game experiences in the app.  Animations for tax year-end, compound interest games, save and invest learning experiences, and even one that cracks your phone screen. It’s about making this learning fun.

Data is the proof point

But beyond the fun element – the data stacks up. The 2025 tax year saw a record amount of workplace pension top-ups for Scottish Widows before April’s tax year end*. Some of this was down to gamification techniques helping people understand what they could do and how they could do it. Pension savers who play our compound interest game are more likely to make higher contributions to their pension from a younger age. They get it, the data shows it. 

But it’s also about what you can do fast, and I had the good fortune to join our gaming team in Dundee at a ‘Game Jam’.   It was all about getting our gaming teams, university students, coders and some of the big hitters from legendary gaming company, Rockstar, and other leaders in the world of gaming and giving them a bunch of real-life personal finance challenges to solve. 

Give the teams one problem each. Give them 48 hours to produce a prototype of a game that helped with the challenge. By the end of those 48 hours, I could scan the QR code to play the game that had been developed. This isn’t pension comms as any of us know it, until now.

Pensions can be fun

It’s one part of the future. Pension engagement is changing, and we’re planning a whirlwind of games, bite-sized learning and, yes, making pensions more fun to find out about. 

Of course, defaults are important – they get people started on a savings journey. 

But we need people to engage with their pension, understand what the default outcome looks like for them and encourage them to take control of their own retirement destiny.  

Let’s do that in a way that doesn’t bore them into defeat.

* Source: Reported Workplace PVNBP Sales, produced by Data COE