A lifetime of money management

Fintech Chat
1

I am really surprised that we don’t yet have a good pension account consolidation app.

In the UK the government has been talking about a Pension Dashboard for years but it has not made any real progress.

As individuals switch jobs more frequently you build up pension pots in multiple companies and I would love an app that would give me a single view of all the various accounts/pots.

I understand that you can do transfers into a single provider but that is not always the right financial approach as you can lose guaranteed benefits.

At a minimum I would like to update the accounts annually when the statements are received and have a consolidated view across providers.

A version that is manually updated can’t be that difficult, sometimes I wish I could code myself. :slight_smile:

Whole life finically planning :pray:

2

This is an interesting thought…

So you wouldn’t use a company like PensionBee because you might lose some of your pension benefits?

Have you thought about using Emma to add an offline account for each of your pensions?

3

In my experience 2 things stop consolidating with providers like nutmeg:

  1. Loss of income guarantees from the original policy.
  2. Legally you can’t transfer a pot that is over 30k without getting independent financial advice. A financial review by an IFA costs about £1.5K so you need to check on value for money.

I have a few policies that I have created manual accounts for but it really needs a few more fields to get any benefit for pensions.

Minimum fields would be:
Company Name
Policy Number
Maturity Date
Current fund Value
Projected Fund Value (at maturity)
Projected Annual Pension
Last update date

Then you want a output showing:
-Current total value of all funds
-Projected total value of all funds
-Projected Annual Pension

Ultimately you could get good graphics showing a forward timeline. Emma knows what you are spending now so has great AI opportunities to predict a future financial profile. However the basic information will tell you if you are saving enough to support your whole life or if you need to start saving move.

Clearly this is a pet subject of mine so I am going to force myself to stop typing. :rofl:

4

Haha you’re not alone - we’ve chatted about pensions quite a bit with @plord and @slewis before.

You can see some of their previous suggestions here: Pensions on the road map

I think ultimately there is a lot more we could do with pensions - we’ve got pensions on our long term roadmap so we have a bit of time to figure out exactly what this will look like :blush:

5

Maybe, with all the new investment into emma, the “long term” plan could be a bit sooner :slight_smile:

Part of this is to have some semi-automatic way to update a manual balance ( such as read balance from cloud csv file ) for unsupported pension/ISA accounts. We can then create this from statements, check and allow emma to import. Its too hard / error prone to update an account on the phone.

[ having just written this, I wonder if manual balances could be scanned in via the camera … ]

6

Is Emma planning to be a dashboard provider when the pensions dashboard is launched?

If so, will it be an early adopter?
It seems early adopter testing is scheduled for summer-autumn 2022

7

Hey @o99, we are not looking at this at all. :sweat:

8

Looks like an excellent idea to me.