Go mobile first with dashboards, Swedish expert advises
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Countries building pensions dashboards should go ‘mobile first’, adapt to users’ behaviour and 'be very wise' in what they communicate to time-pressed savers, representatives of pension tracking systems in Sweden, Denmark and Belgium have said.
Those building pensions tracking systems should go mobile first, pensions economist at Sweden’s dashboard minPension, Dan Adolphson Björck argued in a webinar organised by the European Fund and Asset Management Association on Tuesday.
Adolphson Björck said the Swedish service’s technical infrastructure was “rather old” and had been built for desktop computers. “It can be minimised for mobile, but if I have any recommendations for other [pension tracking systems], it is ‘go mobile first’,” he stressed. “About 70% log in using mobile phone now,” he added.
The shift to mobile has been taking place for some time, he noted, and people now expect to be able to do more things on their phones – they “tend to not only want to have a [pension] forecast on mobile but in some cases plan the entire withdrawal on mobile”.
The percentage of users accessing dashboards on their smartphones varies, however; in Denmark, 55% use mobiles to look at PensionsInfo.dk, where they spend just under five minutes. Those using a computer to access it remain on the site for about eight-and-a-half minutes.
Change is a constant in pensions, and dashboards need to adapt to that – both in terms of user behaviour and legislative impacts.
In Sweden, where 58% of 16 to 80-year-olds use minPension, there were about 292,000 new users last year, the vast majority of whom are in the up to 40 age group, with Adolphson Björck saying it was “really encouraging” that younger people are using the site.
Interestingly, younger users were found to prefer seeing their accumulated pension over being shown a forecast of future income.
“Therefore we tend to adapt to that information” about usage, he said, for example giving more information about investment choices or passing pension pots to a partner in case of early death.
The portal will make changes this summer, planned for 16 June, with a stronger focus on specific preferences, Adolphson Björck revealed.
While the focus is currently on younger users, “in the long run, we also want to reach a larger proportion of those who have partially retired”, he added, noting that gradual retirement is widespread in Sweden. The portal is also starting to think about how to allow people to retire online on the portal in future, without having to contact each pension provider individually.
In Belgium, where the state pension provides the vast majority of retirement income, pension tracker Sigedis already lets people retire online.
Sigedis initially covered the state pension, with functions adapted to this. Occupational pensions were only added in 2016 but now offer a similar level of functionality.
“Most users don’t understand why in a digital environment, some functionalities work for the first pillar but not for the second pillar. That is why we now extend [pension] claiming to the second pillar,” said general director Steven Janssen. “We know which provider has accounts for you, we say this person wants to be paid out.”
Sigedis is currently working on making pensions even more user friendly through communications. “The big bang, I think, will happen in October,” said Janssen. This is when all the pension statements that providers need to send to savers each year will be centralised.
“By end of year we will have complete standardisation of language and information architecture,” he explained.
Achieving this was no mean feat, with providers, unions and employers all having a say in how they felt savers should receive privileged information.
Janssen stressed that pension trackers and dashboards are not the only ones vying for users’ attention in this space. “This matters because users have very little time for pensions,” he said, so pension trackers need to be “very wise” in choosing what to communicate.
As two-thirds of users in Belgium do not click past the home screen, much of the information is there. Janssen said there had been a long discussion about whether to show personal pensions but claimed that “people don’t understand the difference” between the second and third pillars. However, he believes that “in five to 10 years we will have the third pillar” on the site.
Similarly, he argued that “people have a hard time understanding lump sums”. Based on this view, the website shows occupational pension pots as annuity income, in line with how the state pension works.
While this aligns the state and occupational pensions, Sigedis is facing a challenge in the shape of state pension reforms.
Janssen said reforms mean the system will be unable to say with confidence what someone’s state pension income will be. The organisation has now made the radical decision to take the state pension offline while new legislation is being implemented.
“We will go offline as soon as the law is voted, because we cannot vouch for the accuracy of the data,” said Janssen. “It’s very tough to do so, but we will.”
Removing core information could potentially affect traffic to the site, but there are design features that can drive users to dashboards. In Denmark, “one issue that generated quite some traffic was... single sign-on from online banking or a pension portal”, said Michael Rasch, deputy director of PensionInfo.dk. “Especially in 2007 to 2009, users came from online banking,” he said.
The Danish site now has 3m to 4m log-ons a year, with some people logging in a few times, some only once a year. Unusually for a dashboard, it allows pdf exporting of pension information.
How do you think UK savers will use the dashboard?
How do you think UK savers will use the dashboard?
