Scottish Widows Workplace Savings Podcast

The 2024 Women and Retirement report highlights the progress made over the past 20 years in narrowing the gender pension gap.

This podcast reviews the key milestones reached in the past two decades, delves into this year's findings, and explores why further action is essential to fully close the gender pensions gap.

In this special, Robert Cochran is joined by ‘Mr Pension Dashboard’ Richard Smith, who has travelled the length of Europe by train analysing all that European pension dashboards have to offer.

For the younger perspective, he is also joined by 20-something Oliver Webster as they discuss what the latest announcements from the government mean for pension dashboards– and just how big a revolution for pension engagement the dashboards promise to be.

In this episode, Robert Cochran is joined by Graeme Bold who has led the Workplace Savings Business at Scottish Widows for 5 years and overseen a digital revolution at Scottish Widows - growing the business to over £100 Billion of assets - whilst delivering best in class digital tools for scheme members and employers. We discuss his 5 years at Scottish Widows, his hopes for the next 5 years, pension dashboard and of course his love for Pension Engagement Season - he even dons the t-shirt.

When you're the caretaker for £181 Bn of funds from 8.3 million insurance, pensions and investment customers, it’s both a massive responsibility and also an opportunity to make a difference. That's what we're discussing today with Eva Cairns, Head of Responsible Investment at Scottish Widows, and Adam Paterson, Investment Director.

We’ll cover highlights from the 2023 Responsible Investment report, including our stewardship activities, investment strategies and the positive impact we’ve achieved.

Really excellent insight - and I also learned about SDG's - and that children are learning this at school!

Full report link https://adviser.scottishwidows.co.uk/assets/literature/docs/61305.pdf

In this episode I'm joined by Pete Glancy to review the 20th Scottish Widows Retirement Report. We look back at 20 years of this landmark report - I spread a bit of pension love and happiness through some of the really good stories in the research - Pete brings us back down to earth explaining the plight of those struggling towards a tough retirement.  Full report here

https://adviser.scottishwidows.co.uk/assets/literature/docs/retirement-report-2024.pdf

Can you gamify pensions?

Of course you can! Just like learning, health, fitness and other areas of your life, gamification techniques are being applied to encourage better outcomes.

In this fascinating podcast I'm joined by real experts designing gamification into the Scottish Widows Pension experience.

What can pensions learn from successful adoption of digital banking?

For this episode, Robert Cochran is joined by our own Scottish Widows digital pension and banking guru Phil Allen and  a new to it all digital native Connor Strachan.  The discussion focuses on what pensions  can learn from the massive take up of digital banking, and what dashboards can learn from open banking.

What if you take away all the product labels and ask people what is important to them when it comes to funding their retirement and spending their pension savings?

In this podcast I'm joined by Pete Glancy one of the authors of the recent Scottish Widows report  into Decumulation - 61266.pdf (scottishwidows.co.uk) we review the fascinating findings, introduce the retirement decumulation cube and look at the guidance and advice people tell us they want at retirement.

We look at the 3 key drivers of retirement products -  Control, Consistency and Legacy and plot everything from Drawdown, to annuities and CDC in the Retirement Matrix

Creating an Award Winning Customer Vulnerability Strategy

Improving support and outcomes for vulnerable customers has become a real focus for providers over the last few years.  In this podcast we hear from those leading the Workplace Support Teams at Scottish Widows about how vulnerable customers are identified, including some heart stopping stories and they share what has gone into creating the Award Winning Strategy to support our most vulnerable customers.

Superb sharing from Scott Gunderson and Niamh Whelan