John Wilson
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Aptia Pensions Pod. I'm John Wilson, Head of Pensions Technical at Aptia and your host today. And today we're going to talk about making decisions about retirement. Pensions and how they work are not universally understood and sometimes people need a bit of help to work out their own situations. Aptia's Pension Decision Service helps people approaching retirement to think through what they might need for life beyond work. 

Today we're going to hear from two of my colleagues, Penny and Stephen, who helped to run this important service. And they're going to tell us about the kind of conversations that take place and how people need help. First of all, Penny and Stephen, do you want to introduce yourself and say a bit more about what you do at Aptia? Penny, do you want to go first? 

Penny Huebner 
Thanks John. So my name is Penny Huebner and I manage the Pension Decision Service here at APTIA. I manage a team of four retirement relationship managers who provide guidance to our members as they're approaching retirement. The team are based in Edinburgh and I also manage two people who also do the administration. So we're a small department but we add a lot of value to the member experience. 

Stephen Blakesley 
Hi John, yeah I'm Stephen Blakesley, I'm Proposition Lead here at Aptia and one of the really interesting parts of my job is I get involved in the new things that we're looking to offer policyholders and members that we look after. That includes sometimes new services we're developing, new partnerships we're working with or like in the case of the Pension Decision Service, something else we acquire that we can now offer to those members and policyholders. So it'll be really interesting John to get into a bit more of the detail of it today. 

John Wilson 
Absolutely, thank you. You're both very welcome. Now there's a bit of a clue in the name but maybe Stephen you can just start by explaining in a bit more detail to our listeners what is the Aptia Pensions Decisions Service. 

Stephen Blakesley 
Yeah, so at its core, John, it's 30 to 45 minutes of one-to-one retirement guidance delivered by one of Penny's team to a member or policy holder, either on the phone or via a video call. It's supported by a guidance website and an online booking system to make sure those appointments can happen. But at its heart, it's that one-to-one conversation between a retirement relationship manager and a member about their retirement benefits. 

John Wilson 
Let's go under the bonnet a little bit there, Stephen. You've alluded to it to a degree, but how exactly does it work? You sort of indicated a multi-channel approach there. 

Stephen Blakesley
Yeah, that's right, John. I think it's really important to take a step back and think about this in the context of the retirement journey that somebody is going through. pension decision service itself sits in the middle of that journey. So if you think about that from an end-to-end perspective, it starts off with a member requesting a retirement quote. That might be something they've requested. It might be a retirement quote that APTI are sending them because they're approaching their normal retirement age. And that quote outlines for them what their benefits will be. 

There's a lot of words, a lot of bits of paper, and it directs them to the Pension Decision Service website. The website has got some initial information on to help them. It's got some guidance on there. It's got a video that explains the service, which is really worth a watch. It's also got a little quiz. So if people think they know a bit about pensions when they're test analysed, they can have a go at that as well. But its primary function is to direct people to able to book an appointment with one of Penny's team to have that retirement guidance session. 

They book that through the website and the website is interactive. It will come up with various sessions that are available at different slots, different times, different dates. They can pick one which is right for them. And then they'll get the joining instructions emailed through to them. Then when they have that retirement guidance session, like I said, that's 30 to 45 minutes, but those things go on for as much as the member needs. And that's structured around the retirement pattern the member's got. So what it does, it allows the retirement relationship manager to step through that. 

Making sure the member understands the various elements to it, understands what the benefits that the pack is telling them. It can help them understand what the different options are, the consequences of those options. Now it's really important to understand that it's guidance. It's not advice. We're not telling people what they should do. But what it can do is help make sure that people understand the words in the pack, understand what their options are, and understand some of the consequences of taking those actions so that they can then work out what's the right thing that suits them going forward. 

The other great thing about the guidance session is that it goes at the pace of the person who is having the session. So they can ask as many questions as they like, they can ask us to slow down, they can ask us to skip bits, they can ask us to repeat bits. It's all about going at the speed and going at the level which is right for the person the retirement relationship manager is talking to. Now once that guidance conversation is finished, we send them a follow-up communication outlining what we covered in the conversation and also what some next steps are and some places there they may be able to get extra help and then people can select their options. They can select their options either by completing their forms or they can use the online capability we've got for someone to go in and select their options as well. And then we set up their retirement benefits like they would have today. Now one thing to note is one of the things someone might decide is they don't want to retire right now. Well that's fine if they don't want to retire right now they don't have to do anything they can just put that to one side. 

And at some point in the future, if they decide, do you know what, now I want to retire maybe a year later, two years later, get another retirement pack. And if they want, have another retirement discussion with one of our retirement relationship managers. One of the important points of the service, Jon, is we don't limit people from coming back to us if they've got further questions. Whether that be, I've had a session, I've reflected on it, I want to have another session to talk about some of those questions, or I've had a session, I've decided to defer my retirement for a couple of years, a couple of years later I come back. Actually, I want to refresh on what those things are. Fine. We can have another guidance conversation. 

John Wilson 
That's excellent, Stephen. so what I took from that is services interactive, personal and tailored. And maybe most importantly, it's not a once and done because people probably think about a lot of questions, you know, after they've finished that initial initial discussion. 

Stephen Blakesley 
absolutely, John. think you're spot on. It's a lot to take in, isn't it? These packs are big and complicated and let's not forget what our time of pack is. This is something saying to somebody, these are the income options that you'll make a decision on now that are going to affect you for the rest of your life. So it's understandable that you might have that initial conversation, reflect on it and have some more questions later. 

John Wilson 
Thanks Stephen. I mean, so the value is obvious there, but we should probably highlight the fact that the Pensions Decision Service is actually quite a recent acquisition for our business here at Aptia. So could you talk a little bit about what the drivers were for making this acquisition and why we felt that PDS, as we call it, is such an important part of Aptia? 

Stephen Blakesley 
Yeah, sure. So we acquired the service at the start of this year, but the service itself has been running for about nine years, nearly 10 years now. So it's well established, lots of expertise within the team that deliver it, Penny and the guys doing the guidance calls. We thought it was really important here at Aptia. I guess there's a couple of reasons. For us in Aptia, we think it's a service where there's an opportunity for more clients to think about. 

Is this something that would support my members? A significant number of the administration clients we've got today, John, they use it, but there's lots of clients that don't. Some of them, that might be for a good reason. Some of it, they may not even know exists. So one of the things we want to do is talk to more of our clients about this service and see if it's something that they think could be useful for their members. In terms of how important it is for members, I guess we come back to three key points when we think about this in AppTier about why the pension decision service is so important. 

Number one is we think people are asking for it. There's a really interesting study done by Standard Life at the back of 2025 and it's asking a lot of defined benefit pension members questions about their pensions. And it asked them what kind of help would you like at retirement? And 41 % of them said actually what they wanted is a one-to-one session, something like the Pension Decision Service. So it feels like, that's a significant amount of people retiring who would benefit from that kind of help. Secondly, 

This decision is one of the biggest financial decisions that lot of people will make. One of the things we did is we looked back over the last 10 years and using the value of defined benefit transfer value as kind of a proxy for how much a defined benefit pension is worth to someone, we compared that to the average house price over the last 10 years. Now in six of those 10 years, the value of the defined benefit transfer was higher. So a lot of the time we're talking about a financial thing that in some way could be valued more than someone's house. So deciding how you're going to, the options you're going to take on that, what you're going to do with that, really is one of the biggest financial decisions that people could make. And then one thing that's particularly of interest here to us at Act here is behavioural science and some of the psychology around that. And I think if you start delving into that, you really see some of the reasons why having something like the Pension Decision Service is so important. 

John Wilson 
Thanks for that, Stephen. For the benefit of our listeners, I think you should probably explain a bit more about behavioral science. I'm sure it would help if you could give us an example too, please. 

Stephen Blakesley 
Yeah, sure. So, behavioural science is really the study of how people think and in particular the biases or shortcuts that they go through in their behaviour that leads them to different outcomes or leads them to different decisions. Now, those biases and shortcuts are needed because it's a busy, complicated world out there, John, and people's brains need some help to navigate around it. However, there's risks, right? Those shortcuts, those biases in people's brains can lead them to suboptimal decisions. 

And actually, when we start thinking about some of those behavioural science biases that exist in people, some of them are directly pointed against making a good decision at retirement. In some ways, the ways people's thinking works, the way their brains work, is actually pushing them in the wrong direction. So you asked for a couple of examples. A really good one is about longevity. There's been lots of science about people not being able to accurately predict how long they think they're going to live for. 

Now, a recent study showed that 80 % of people who are over 50 significantly underestimate how long they think they're going to live for. Basically, people are living a lot longer than they think they are and therefore they're not really understanding and appreciating what later life is going to be because they think in a lot of instances they're not going to get to what they would define as later life. The reality is people are living for a lot longer. What I found really interesting when we got into the into the science of it all is a study that Club Vita did in 2022, where they studied this trend around the world. They were saying, this a thing local to particular countries or cultures, or is this a global phenomenon? The answer was, it's a global phenomenon. Across the world, people are understating their longevity. However, when they looked across all the countries in the world, they did find that the country where people have the biggest gap between their perceived longevity and how long they're actually going to live for was here in the UK, which highlights how much of a problem it is for the people that we're looking after here. A second example, John, that I like to talk about is the role of confidence and particularly the role of overconfidence. There's a really interesting study. It's on bit of a tangent, but the University of Sweden did a study where they asked people whether they were safer than the average driver. 88 % of people thought they were safer than the average driver. 

And we see this kind of result replicated across lots of different studies. Basically, people tend to be overconfident in their ability to make decisions, and when they are overconfident in their ability to make decisions, they make decisions faster without fully thinking about all the ramifications of those. And what's worrying is we've seen evidence that that applies to pension decisions. So that study I talked about, A Standard Life, earlier on in the back of 2025, they also started to ask some people about questions about did they understand their pension. What was worrying about some of the responses that they got was they got quite a significant percentage of people, I think it was about 86 % of people said they felt confident in their five benefit pension scheme. But then when they started to push them a bit harder and say, okay, great, you feel confident in it, but how much do you actually understand about how it works? And how much do you understand about what it will do in the future? 

About seven in 10 people then at some point said they were confused or unclear about something. So you had this initial response where people were saying, yeah, actually, I think I'm confident in my defined benefit pension. And when you probe into it, didn't have the underlying knowledge to actually back up that confidence. So one of the really good things about the pension decision service is if you think about these biases, if you think of these things that could be pushing people's brains down the wrong pathway, one of the ways to move them out of it is by having a conversation, by having a discussion. 

We can't really help people think differently if we're writing down stuff on paper, it's not very engaging. But you're having a conversation, you're talking to people, you can start to work against some of those biases and get people to engage that reflective thinking part of their brain to start thinking harder about actually, how long am I going to be here for? And what does later life look like for me? And how does that influence the decisions that I'm going to make today about my retirement? 

John Wilson 
Thanks Stephen. Let's turn to these actual conversations now. Penny, can you say a little bit more about what is a typical day for people working in the Pensions Decision Service? 

Penny Huebner 
So typically our time relationship manager would have about seven or eight appointments a day where they would call a member at the agreed date and time and have that guidance call. So it's important to make it you're aware that it is guidance and not advice. And although the calls are structured to make sure members are aware of all their options, we speak to a variety of people with different levels of knowledge when it comes to pensions. 

Some who are very clued up and some people who have never even thought about their pension and they're just coming to that stage of retirement and a little bit confused. So it's really there to help a member understand their options. As Stephen mentioned, it's a personalised service. So we're here to guide a member through all the options available to them, both within the pension scheme itself and outwith the scheme. And also talk to them about some of the risks involved in some of the options. know, for example, if they're in a defined benefit pension, and we're interested in transferring, so highlighting to them the types of guarantees that they may lose. I think what's important about the service and what I think members really, value is not only are we here to guide them through and explain the options, but we're also here to listen to members and really try to understand what they're looking to get for their pension and really get them to start thinking about what's important to them. 

We do speak to a wide variety of members, a lot of members who, particularly at the moment due to the cost of living, just want to access some additional money to help them with that and they've not potentially looked at the bigger picture. So we talk to them about things such as have you considered how much income you're going to need in retirement? Do need that to be a guaranteed income? Have you considered whether you need to provide for a loved one when you pass away? If you're still working, have you considered the tax implications of potentially taking the pension or now or how that's going to work in the future. So really here to try and get people to think about, you know, what's important to them before they make that informed decision. It's a big decision. It's one of the biggest financial decisions someone will make. We're not here to change anyone's mind at the end of the day. All we're here to do is to really educate and guide members to make them aware of what they can do as opposed to what they should do. 

We get really, really good feedback from the service. Members really value what we do. And as Stephen also mentioned, it's not a one-stop shop as such. We can speak to members as often as they need to. And we will talk them through the process and guide them from the stage of getting the retirement pack until that stage of actually taking their benefits. And just to back up the fact that the members really do value the service that the retirement relationship managers provide in the Pension Decision Service. 

After every conversation we do ask a member to complete a survey asking for some feedback on how they found the conversation and we ask four questions and we ask them to score out of five and near to date across all four questions the average score that we received is 4.73 which out of five I think really reflects the excellent service we provide to members. 

And we have also started to introduce this moving to app to asking for some verbal comments or commentary on how they found the conversation. And again, you know, some of the comments that we receive from the service is absolutely excellent. Just to give you a couple of examples, one comment we received from a member was that the retirement relationship manager's explanation of how the pension options work was really great. And for the first time, they understood what the options were and then went on to comment that frankly the conversation was a revelation, which I think is excellent feedback. We also from one member had feedback that the retirement relationship manager was fantastic and they explained to them clearly and patiently every time they asked a question and mentioned the retirement relationship manager's explanation was easy to follow and they were very, very approachable. 

That's partly down to the fact that the term relationship managers not only guide them through the options, they listen to what members say, but what they also do is they're there to really pick up on the members' level of knowledge, vulnerabilities, adapt that conversation and try and keep pension jargon out of that conversation, trying to keep it simple, clear and easy to understand. as we see, the appointments are typically 30, 40 minutes long. 

If a member needs longer, we will spend as long as we need to work with that member really to make sure that they fully understand that there are options. And you've got to think about at the end of the day, it is a big decision. But in our lifetime, most people only retire once. So it's a big decision that they need to make once in their life. But I certainly think, you know, that the service that we provide helps members, you know, it's excellent, the service that they provide. 

It's really beneficial to everyone to seek some form of guidance. But as well as, you know, just providing that guidance to help them make an informed decision, we can also help, you know, members avoid pension scams, you know, by making sure that if they do need additional help that we can signpost them to certain other services, such as government services, you know, where they can source financial advisors. So we're really there to help them through their full retirement journey. 

Stephen Blakesley 
One of the things I would just add, John, I spend a lot of my time looking at data, thinking about propositions and looking at all kinds of numbers. It was really eye opening to see the feedback comments that Penny described, of their and we've got more example of those, but it really did open your eye to the human value of the service. People talking about how they've understood things in a way that they've just never understood things before. You really see the value of a conversation between people and how useful the service is, is a real eye-opener. 

John Wilson 
Yeah, I mean, thanks both. There was some excellent testimonials there. I think another aspect of this looking forward is that we're promoting the pensions decision service at quite a pivotal time in our industry in terms of changes and pensions along practice. We've got a new Act of Parliament on pensions. We're talking about relevant topics like targeted support, guided retirement, the advice guidance boundary. 

John Wilson 
You alluded to tax penny and a year's time, pensions are potentially going to come into the scope of inheritance tax. And that's going to be a big issue for members of the schemes that we look after and the people using the pension decision service. So let's speak to the future of PDS and where we see its role being, how we see it expanding. mean, it sounds as though we envisage only a growth in the need for this type of service to trustees of pension schemes and their members. Stephen, do you want to take that first? 

Stephen Blakesley 
Yeah, sure. I think it's a really good point, John. Things are evolving and I really think that within all the different kinds of services that Administrator Eliak-Aptia needs to offer, it's about having a suite of different things that you can bring to different sorts of problems. And one of the things we want to have in that toolkit is that ability for experts to have a conversation with people because eventually in some decisions, some areas of risk, some areas of complexity, you can... 

you can look at things through a conversation in a way that actually you can only go so far through when you've got a paper pack. You can only go so far with a written word. Now, so I think there's certainly a role potentially for a guidance type service and some of those other things you talked about, John, whether it be to help people understand what some of the implications of inheritance tax at bereavement are. We've been thinking about the fact that we understand that a lot of people who are receiving a dependence pension, 

So these are quite often the spouse of a member who is in a pension scheme. They've got this thing paying them a pension that they may not really know anything about because they weren't in the scheme themselves. They may not have really understood much about it. They may not have had lots of conversations about it with the original member when the member was still here. Is there an opportunity to have a guidance service that just talks them through it? It's not guidance in terms of a decision, but just helping people understand what they've got, what's going to be paying them money for the rest of their life. So we think there's a number of areas where there's a position for a guidance service or position for that one-to-one conversation between people. I also think that there's some learnings that we can get from the pension decision service to help us design some of our other services. Some of those testimonials that Penny gave, some of the insight we've got from Penny's team talking to people for years and years and about the concerns they've got with retirement. How can we use that information and that knowledge to help us design our services, to help us design how people may select their retirement decisions in the future, whether that be, for example, supported by a guidance service or whether people might want something similar online that helps them step through some of the decisions they want to make. There's some really, really useful expertise and experience there that can help us with the design of our services in the future. And then I guess my final point, John, would be we offer the pension decision service today. 

Stephen Blakesley 
To people who are both in defined benefit and defined contribution schemes. Now clearly, I think if you look at how pension schemes are evolving and you think, for example, about collective defined contribution, where you've got people who'll be making retirement decisions, but you might have a benefit in the future that works a bit differently to anything that we've got today, where you've got a pension being paid to you, but the way that increases could fluctuate in the future. You've got certain risks there, certain things that are really important to communicate. 

Maybe in that kind of environment, having a conversation at retirement which helps you both understand your options, but also understand how that opinion is going to behave and perform in the future and understand the risks involved. It's a really good way to make sure people know what they're going to be relying on for the rest of their lives and does something more than you can do maybe just in the written page. 

John Wilson 
Yeah, absolutely, Stephen. I agree collective defined contribution is probably going to be a prominent feature of our pensions landscape. Maybe from 2027 we will see the first schemes and I'm sure you know that this is another area in which people will be looking for some help and guidance on. So I'm assuming Penny that you share many of Stephen's sentiments and see a very bright future for the Pension Decision Service. 

Penny Huebner 
Definitely, definitely. Stephen and I meet up regularly and I think every time that we do have a conversation we've come up with another idea of another type of route that the pension decision service can go down. So at the moment it's all about, you know, at retirement but certainly there's different areas that we can go into, you know. Is it, you know, something where we can speak to members pre-retirement to get them to think about the types of things that they should be considering as they're approaching retirement to prepare for that moment in time. 

You know people who are potentially looking to transfer, can we have a more in-depth transfer conversation? But also you know we find a lot of the schemes that we already deal with, you know we have members going through redundancy programs and potentially paying some redundancy monies into the pension. Could we tap into that world of where we can have a guidance call to explain how that is going to work in the larger scheme of things? And that's just a couple of examples but certainly I can see the Pension Decision Service growing but also diversifying into different areas to help trustees, businesses, members. think the future for the pension decision services is very bright. 

John Wilson 
Yes, it was both bright and very multifaceted as well. mean, it sounds, you know, an exciting area of the business for anyone to work in. know, thank you both. Thank you, Penny. And thank you, Stephen. That was really helpful. And I hope our listeners found it as instructive as I did. That's it for this episode of the Aptia Pensions Pod. 

Thank you for joining us as we explored decisions that need to be made about retirement and introduced you to our pension decision service. Do remember we release new episodes every month bringing you expert insights and the latest developments in pensions. So please be sure to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform so you never miss an episode. For more information and updates, do visit the Aptia website. 

We'll be back next time with another important discussion and I hope to see you then. Just before I go, just the usual small print, please do remember that the content provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice. Thank you and goodbye.