Aviva wants to partner with LinkedIn to help the public unearth the 2.5 million pensions that are unaccounted for.
The move - revealed by the Times - comes off the back of a survey of 10,000 people carried out by the UK insurance firm last year, which found that around 13 per cent of people have at least one pension they had forgotten about. The 2.5 million estimate has been extrapolated from that survey, so the real figure could be much lower or indeed, higher. The survey found most people thought only one pension pot had gone missing, but 17 per cent had forgotten two and 6 per cent three or more. The UK government’s own findings show that £400m in pension savings have gone unclaimed.
According to the Times article, global chairman of Aviva UK digital Chris Wei said: “We’d like to partner with LinkedIn to create a scheme which could be called the UK’s biggest treasure hunt.” That treasure hunt, according the article, could include other social networking sites beyond LinkedIn.
Aviva warned in its 2016 survey that these kinds of forgotten pensions pots may have lost significant value over the years because of changes to policies that went unmanaged by customers. “People need to be aware of the potential risks of having a number of different pension pots with small amounts of money in each,” said Andy Curran, managing director, corporate and business solutions at Aviva. “It’s likely there will still be charges taken out of those pots for their management and administration and that can have implications if you are no longer contributing into them.”
The insurance firm also released a series of stats, each more miserable than the last, showing how the British public rarely reviews its savings and pensions. As a result of the auto-enrollment pension scheme of a few years ago, there are also far more people who are totally unaware of their pension choices.
The government has its own pension tracking service which can be accessed here, and pushed for the creation of a digital pension ‘dashboard’ in the 2016 Budget - this should be launched in spring this year by the Association of British Insurers and will allow users to see their various pensions in one place.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
