CoRI is designed to enable those in their pre-retirement years to quickly calculate how much they need to save, in order to generate a specific annual retirement income. For individuals over 65, CoRI enables them to assess the breadth of their pension pot and evaluate strategies for generating income.

CoRI uses real world, real-time data, based on UK bond indices, which looks at current interest rates, inflation expectations, mortality projections and other factors. The data is updated daily to provide a quick and forward-looking view and an accurate picture of future annual retirement income. This distinguishes CoRI from other tools for retirement planning, which are retrospective and not responsive to real-time market variables.

Today there are 20 CoRI indices, one each for a specific year when you turn age 65, from 2006 to 2025. Therefore, someone who turns 65 in 2019 would use the CoRI Index 2019 as the metric to calculate retirement income.

CoRI also allows investors to measure the value of their existing portfolios against their goals for retirement income and enables them to track the progress of their retirement income and adjust their investment plan if necessary.

The tool has been created to simplify and improve the way individuals and their advisers plan and save for retirement. As the BlackRock Investor Pulse survey revealed, only two in five (43%) of Britons know how much they should be saving for retirement, and 44% are not saving anything at all.

Tony Stenning, Head of UK Retail at BlackRock, comments: “Britons aged between 55 and 74 are battling the pre-retirement challenge, when planning is critical to financial security in their later years. The BlackRock Investor Pulse survey revealed that only a third (36%) of those in this age group are confident their current savings and investments will ensure a comfortable retirement. What is clear is that individuals need help to identify what they need in retirement. Too much focus has been placed on the size of individuals pension pots rather than the amount of income they require and people need help to understand whether they will achieve their desired goal, and if not, what they need to do to close this gap. CoRI helps savers in a practical and very simple way. It uses real-time numbers to provide real answers and valuable insight into what their retirement may look like.”

Chip Castille, Chief Retirement Strategist at BlackRock, adds: “With continued uncertainty in financial markets, coupled with longer life expectancy, savers need a simple and reliable means to understand their retirement readiness. BlackRock supports the choice and freedom the UK pension reforms have given to people. However, with this comes much greater responsibility and individuals are not tasked with an easy feat - how does someone know how much to save when they don’t know how long they are going to live?

“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change people’s attitudes - they need to understand with certainty whether their savings will provide a sufficient income to support their desired lifestyle in retirement. CoRI will go some way to helping address that income challenge and help savers visualise their financial future.