The personalised 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 their 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, particularly when information is conveyed in a formal way. This means that they end up ignoring their pensions and putting off making effective retirement plans. Understanding the investment decisions behind retirement saving can have a big impact on people’s quality of life in years to come.
To tackle this, Smart has used animated illustration to build a story around a member’s pension, making use of 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 web browser, tapping into Smart’s Keystone platform API so that the information the user sees is live, not pre-rendered at some earlier point in time, which is how traditional video statements work.
Today’s launch follows a very successful Beta trial with nearly 8,000 members in the UK. The animated pension journey is available to all customers in 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 retirement 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 responding to human questions in real time via an ordinary computer or mobile, joined Smart in the UK to provide customer service support to over one million members, 24/7, 365 days a year.

Harry Brignull, Head of Innovation at Smart, said:
“In the decade since the introduction of auto enrolment in the UK, we’ve seen millions of people saving for retirement for the first time - but a lot of them still aren’t saving enough into their pensions. Why? At Smart our Innovation team sees this from the lens of behaviour change and cognitive psychology - and we’re using state of the art technology to address it.

“The underlying issue is that many savers don’t know what to do or when to do it. Often they also don’t know what “good enough” is - whether it’s enough time, attention or money. We are addressing this through nudges and messages, asking our members to complete one bite-sized task each time. Bit by bit, over the course of their pension journey, they’ll learn enough and take enough actions to ensure they’re heading into retirement with their eyes wide open.

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