Standard Life, the financial services company, has managed to get people more engaged with their pensions by developing a deeper understanding of the behaviours and motivations of different generations.

People generally understand they have a responsibility to ensure their pension meets their needs, but actual engagement with the industry is low, so Standard Life looked beyond the typical financial life journey map.

The idea was to “think about both how generations are different from each other and also how things vary within generations”, head of insight Sue Hayward told the recent MRS Financial Services Research conference. (For more read WARC’s report: How Standard Life addressed the ‘niggle factor’ in pensions.)

Millennials, for example, can be classified depending on their view of life, some being driven and ambitious, some carefree and not particularly materialistic while a third group is financially stretched. But most expect their future to be better, although they are less certain on how they will achieve that.

Generation X is rather more pessimistic: squeezed between ageing parents and young children, this age group has large outgoings and unhappy memories of the failures of the financial sector – from endowment shortfalls through PPI mis-selling to the 2007 crash – that make them hesitant about long-term financial commitments.

Baby Boomers are financially comfortable – many are still working and saving – and using new pension freedoms to “invest in human capital” by helping out their children and grandchildren.

Each of these generations requires a different approach and by combining these behavioural insights with all the other information it already holds on its customers, Standard Life has built needs-based segmentation model to help it deliver “targeted personalised communications”.

That might seem obvious but what’s important, said Hayward, is that “You do it lots and at different times with different messages, but always fit those with that person’s positioning.”

This approach has pushed open rates and CTRs far above the industry benchmarks while logins to the Standard Life dashboard and app are up 65%, she reported.

Sourced from WARC