Consumer Duty Champion | R-Day 🎃 = Better Outcomes for 92% of Workers | Helping CEOs & Workers become Net Zero Heroes
🔮 Let's roll back to May 2010 and my predicitions during a face to face meeting with the FSA in Canary Wharf. We were discussing the previous decade of Stakeholder Pensions failing to win over Consumers, despite a 50% reduction in average fees being charged. Aviva and Deloitte had completed pan European research into the retirement savings gap, hailed as the most comprehensive deep dive into the shortfall amounts facing workers at retirement. You don't have to be an Actuary and build a fancy excel spreadsheet with complex formulas to know why people don't save enough into pensions; ➡️ Affordability ➡️ Lack of relevance to common needs ➡️ Lack of trust because of being far too complex to understand THE PROBLEM IN 2️⃣0️⃣1️⃣0️⃣ The average shortfall was around £200,000 for those Most at Risk (MaR) e.g. workers facing the biggest proportionate drop in income at retirement. THE PROBLEM IN 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ The average shortfall has leapt by 25% to £250,000 for those MaR. The Coalition Government chose to implement Auto Enrolment (AE) policy from 2012 onwards. Forcing people to save into a flawed product solution that fails to meet the needs of the vast majority of savers was a terrible idea because it was virtually guaranteed to deliver the same (or similar) outcomes to 10yrs of Stakeholder Pensions introduced under Tony Blair's New Labour. So in 2023 the AE chickens came home to roost, as did my prediction that low cost platforms would increase shortfalls, not reduce them. It astounds me that UKFS is allowed to promote the same sh!te product solutions as 5 🌟 after failing to meet the needs of 92% of workers. The FSA knew back in 2010 that Pensions La La Land would probably fail to do the right thing for consumers, and they were right. Now we have Consumer Duty and a £600bn financial harm elephant in the room that Price and Value expectations will expose in 2024. With Gen X workers losing between £60,000 to £100,000 each over the last decade, I expect my platform to be busy referring SMCRs to their Enforcement Division in the New Year. 🔮 I predict big disruption to be in motion by #RDay 🎃 2024 and Restitution Funding to top £100m within 12 months. Just Saying 🤷♂️ #BUOM