Landscape explores emotion at Professional Pensions Live 2023
Professional Pensions Live is an annual showcase of the UK pensions industry, covering various hot topics from member communications to deadlines for regulation and industry changes. Held at 155 Bishopsgate in London, their 2023 event shined a spotlight on DB schemes, governance and regulation, member engagement, and much more.
Being a London-based agency, we’ve made regular appearances at Professional Pensions Live. It’s always an excellent opportunity to meet like-minded professionals, keep up with the latest developments in the pensions world and perhaps learn a new insight or two. This year, however, we were invited to speak alongside an impressive roster of industry leaders, providers and schemes.
Delivered by our Creative and Delivery Director, Ryan Sales and Behavioural Consultant, Marliane Owen, our talk looked at the role that emotions play in decision-making.
Emotions are powerful drivers and they can have a substantial impact on our attitudes towards money but aren’t utilised enough by trustees or members – an insight that was perfectly summarised by Marliane:
“Every trustee or pension manager we spoke to wants to get their communications strategy right but sometimes finds it hard to balance with their other priorities. For the industry as a whole, recognising the role of feelings in decision-making will go a long way in creating better pension engagement.”
Ryan also addressed one of the key themes of the day: the big, burgeoning world of ‘digital’, including AI and popular social media apps like TikTok. Instead of being feared, it should be welcomed with open arms, as it has the potential to be used as “a force for good” in education and engagement.
“We’re pleased to see the industry starting to embrace these technologies,” Ryan said, “and we anticipate it will only continue to grow.”
At the end of the talk, Ryan and Marliane answered a few questions from the audience. One that was of particular interest was “What words should we use?”. They highlighted one in particular: “less”.
Ryan added, “We need to focus on making processes easy and empowering members to make decisions where the defaults don’t exist.”
Did you attend, or have additional thoughts/questions about our speech? Please send them our way via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
