Private Markets present an exceptional opportunity for UK pension savers to diversify their portfolios and achieve stable, inflation-linked returns. This asset class offers access to a range of long-term investments in sectors such as wind, solar, hydrogen, heating, and storage assets. As the DC market increasingly looks to allocate significant investments to private markets, investment vehicles like Long-Term Asset Funds (LTAFs) have emerged as an attractive option for DC members.

This session will address:

• The benefits of investing in private markets for DC scheme
• Are LTAFs the way forward, and why?
• What are the challenges that come with investing in private markets, and how can we overcome these?
• Will investing in private markets boost DC investment over time?

Pension websites and portals are an extremely effective means of communication as they measure engagement and can provide valuable insight into member behaviours. Join Ryan as he delves into how analysing website activity can help improve scheme engagement, cut costs, empower members to take action and plan for the future.

Effective, timely and informed decisions about pensions are a huge challenge - an FCA report last year suggested that 33% of non-retired adults have never thought about their pension before. Taking a behavioural approach to this challenge can help. Thinks Applied Behavioural Science Team’s experiment conducted for the Association of British Insurers showed how a combination of personalisation and simple design and copy changes can dramatically improve financial decision making.

Thinks delivered an iterative mixed-methods intervention design and test (with COM-B) to produce evidence for the impact of personalised guidance on the quality of decision making around pensions for the Association of British Insurers (ABI). We created user journey maps to select appropriate pensions decisions, conducted qualitative research with people making those decisions and industry experts, co-designed personalised guidance options drawing on both the behavioural science literature and experts from the pensions industry and ran an online RCT to produce rigorous evidence of impact.

This session will address:

• This recent work (that fed into the Advice/Guidance Boundary Review and ‘targeted support’ system proposal from the FCA and HMT)
• How taking a behavioural approach can improve outcomes for your customers