Earlier this year, we met with members of Aviva’s marketing team to look at their engagement campaigns throughout 2020. By targeting members at certain times during their retirement journey, they are able to tailor communications and digital content to make it appropriate to you when needed.
Campaigns during the year concentrated on the impact of Covid-19 and pension scams, making members aware of their options and the risks to their pensions savings by helping them to stay alert to scammers. Online communications also focussed on tax year end matters and pension consolidation. They used intelligent marketing technology to generate timely communications to new members and to those leaving their employer. Over the course of 2020, Aviva issued well in excess of a million engagement communications to you and we continued to see these numbers rising in the early part of 2021.
The number of you using MyAviva – Aviva’s online tool for accessing all of your Aviva products – has increased significantly. This allows you to view and manage your pension online, update your details and gain access to a wide range of educational material and tools (including a retirement projection modeller) so as to better plan for retirement and this includes information on the funds you are invested in so you can change these if you wish. It is a valuable engagement tool and simple to activate.
In addition, more of you have access to MyAviva via an app than was the case a year ago and we are keen for Aviva to continue to roll this out to even larger numbers of policyholders and to increase the app functionality so that it fully replicates the on line experience. This will facilitate further engagement and allow Aviva to better tailor and segment communications so that you receive appropriate updates, suggested actions or “nudges” at the right time.
Aviva’s Financial Education Team runs a number of valuable engagement seminars to educate members in various areas of retirement planning. We have attended a number of these sessions and found them very rich in terms of content with simply explained terminology, good interaction with participants and very useful post-event communications providing links to additional material.
One of the benefits of running these sessions virtually is that the team can reach more people. In 2020, they saw a 21% increase in the number of attendees but with almost 30% fewer sessions being held. Many employers have fed back to Aviva that they very much prefer these online learning sessions to worksite presentations, and it will be interesting to see how new ways of working are adopted going forward.
Their core sessions are aimed at target audiences:
They also offer a series of seminars covering generic matters such as pension basics, investments, managing your pension online, the pros & cons of consolidating pension plans and how to transfer a pension. Feedback from members attending these sessions has been consistently high throughout the year with 93% of attendees saying they would recommend to a colleague.
If you are unable to join these sessions, Aviva provides a targeted marketing campaign which gives you access to recordings of these sessions when they are relevant to you. We would encourage you to consider viewing these sessions if you are able to do so.
The Aviva Financial Advisers team has seen significant change this year, both in the areas which they advise on and the way they charge for this service. In previous years they have only advised on your pension savings in accumulation and at retirement. They now look at all of your savings and assets when giving advice to give you a more complete picture of the options open to you.
All advisers are salaried – they receive no incentive to provide advice which may generate additional income for them and so there is no risk of a “hard sell” to you.
We fully appreciate that many members will not have experience in seeking financial advice and may be put off doing so as it can appear expensive, but research has shown that members who take advice are generally better off in retirement with 20% more assets and nearly 18% more income. Aviva’s fee structure is now split between a percentage of the assets to which your advice applies and a fixed fee for the report the adviser will provide you with. That fixed fee is higher for defined benefit (DB) advice than it is for defined contribution (DC) advice. However, the DB advice fee includes any advice required for your DC pension assets. All DB advice is independently checked for suitability providing what we believe to be a suitable control.
The advisers are required to take into account any customer vulnerabilities and will need to evidence that these have been considered before advice is given. There is a focus here on whether any coercion or family related fraud is apparent, and all advisers are required to undertake financial crime high risk role training. All advice cases where vulnerable customers have been identified are pre-sale checked regardless of the experience of the adviser.
We are confident that the Aviva advice proposition offers good value and that the controls in place ensure that inappropriate advice is not given. We have been provided with a comparison of charges between Aviva and other providers and are happy that their charges are competitive and reasonable when compared to other providers. This is particularly true for larger pots.