Smart launches personalized pension animations for savers

Smart, the London-headquartered fintech disrupting the global retirement savings market, today launches retirement animations for its retirees. The personalized animations provide an overview of a pension in a simple, digestible and more accessible way. The animation takes customers on a journey through how much they have saved for retirement, showing how much their savings have grown and where their money is invested.

Many consumers find pensions unappealing or struggle to understand their investments, especially when information is communicated in a formal way. This means they end up ignoring their pensions and delaying creating effective retirement plans. Understanding the investment decisions behind retirement savings can have a major impact on people’s quality of life for years to come.

To tackle this, Smart has used animated illustration to build a story around a member’s pension, using intuitive content design to break down complex information into simple, digestible chunks. Unlike a standard video, Smart’s approach involves rendering the animation in the member’s browser, tapping Smart’s Keystone platform API so that the information the user sees is live, not pre-rendered at a previous time, which is how traditional video statements work.

Today’s launch follows a very successful beta version with almost 8,000 members in the UK. The animated retirement journey is available to all customers of Smart’s UK business, Smart Pension. The feature will also be available to Keystone platform customers in other countries around the world.

Smart has brought a number of innovations to pension savings. The company already uses various AI tools as part of its work. In June 2022, Smart brought SAVA (its ‘Smart Avatar Virtual Assistant’) on board its UK customer service team. The Digital Human, a super-realistic, fully interactive avatar, capable of answering human questions in real-time via a standard computer or mobile, joined Smart in the UK to provide customer service support to over one million members, 24/7, 365 days a the year.

Harry Brignull, head of innovation at Smart, said:

“In the decade since the introduction of car registration in the UK, we have seen millions of people save for their pension for the first time – but many of them are still not saving enough for their pensions. Why? At Smart, our innovation team sees this through the lens of behavior change and cognitive psychology – and we use state-of-the-art technology to solve it.

“The underlying problem is that many savers do not know what to do or when to do it. They also often don’t know what “good enough” is – whether there is enough time, attention or money. We address this through nudges and messages, asking our members to complete a small task each time. Bit by bit, over the course of their retirement journey, they will learn enough and take enough action to ensure they head into retirement with their eyes wide open.

“The animated retirement review feature is just one part of this strategy. We are one of the first in retirement savings to offer a real-time animated retirement review, and we will continue to innovate across our next-generation global savings technology platform.”