Some of the Best Ideas are the Simplest

After spending most of my career in relationship management and sales, joining Avida International has given me the opportunity to see workplace pensions and employee benefits through a completely different lens. It has also introduced me to some remarkable innovators who are applying modern technology to longstanding challenges.

I therefore write this wearing two hats: As a Senior Adviser at Avida International, and the other as a member of the advisory board at Fincentive.

What attracted me to Fincentive was that it addresses one of the biggest challenges our industry has faced for decades: meaningful member communication.

Despite huge investment in websites, portals, apps and engagement campaigns, we still struggle to connect people with one of the most important aspects of their financial future. 

Not just their pension. Their wider financial wellbeing.

Perhaps the irony is that we've been looking for the answer in the wrong place. We're constantly asking people to visit another portal, download another app or open another email.

Yet there's one financial communication that people expect to receive and routinely engage with.

Their payslip.

The pension payment is a remarkable thing. It represents a verified source of income. Not the whole financial picture, but an important foundation of it. It arrives on a known date, from a trusted institution to a known individual. It is regular, expected and reliable.

Yet, the communication that accompanies it has barely begun to realise its potential. Once delivered digitally through the right infrastructure, that verified income data becomes much more than a payment notification. It can become the foundation for timely, personalised and relevant communication. It can help identify unclaimed benefits such as Pension Credit, highlight important life events, improve member engagement, support vulnerability identification and signpost people towards guidance when they are most likely to need it.

In other words, the payslip stops being simply a confirmation of payment and becomes a genuine point of connection.

Importantly all this applies to working life when the payslip arrives with every payment. I was surprised to learn that in retirement it mostly disappears. The pension is paid every month, but the payslip typically arrives once or twice a year, on paper or via a portal, detached from the payments it describes. The payment moment (as it stands today) is nearly silent.

I was also surprised by just how many pension payslips are still issued on paper. Moving to digital clearly brings efficiency benefits through reduced printing and postage costs, but the real opportunity is far greater. It creates a trusted, regular communication channel that already exists, rather than requiring members to engage somewhere new. What particularly appealed to me is the elegance of the implementation. The payslip itself doesn't need to change. Whilst the payment arrives exactly as it always has, the payslip arrives alongside it, with the relevant information added before it reaches the member. The money doesn't change course; the communication becomes smarter.

There are many wider implications too, from benefit tracking and member engagement to meeting trustee responsibilities, data quality, administration standards and the evolving expectations of Consumer Duty.

If you'd like to explore the concept further, I'd encourage you to take a look at Fincentive. The more I see, the more I believe that the future of member engagement won't necessarily come from asking people to do something different.

It may simply come from making far better use of something they're already looking at.