Roger Shelton, Marketing and Business Development Manager at Transave, added:
“Saving regularly is the single most important thing that a person can do to improve their financial wellbeing so any initiative which promotes payroll savings is to be encouraged. We hope other leading employers will take note of this important trial and consider the advantages of an opt-out savings model for their own employees going forward”.
Jo Phillips, Director of Research and Innovation at Nest Insight, comments:
“We know from our sidecar saving trial that a lot of employees like the idea of building up short-term savings through automatic payroll deduction, but many don’t get around to signing up even if they intend to – a pattern that’s often seen with other voluntary savings solutions and workplace benefits. In this trial, we’re excited to see what happens when you overcome inertia and remove sign-up friction by switching the default if you do nothing from ‘not saving’ to ‘saving’ whilst, importantly, preserving choice. The approach has the potential to be a real game-changer for financial wellbeing by supporting employees to follow through on intentions to save.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us very clearly the importance of having accessible, emergency savings on hand to help protect against financial shocks. But concerningly, it’s estimated that around 11.5 million people in the UK have less than £100 of savings to fall back on. We hope that our research can build understanding of how we can help many more people who want to build up a financial buffer to get started with saving and begin to turn the tide on the low levels of financial resilience seen particularly among low and moderate income workers.”
“Nest Insight and the academic team are grateful to SUEZ and Transave for their time and dedication to setting up this ground-breaking trial with us, to the BlackRock Foundation and MaPS for their generous support, and to the FCA regulatory sandbox for working with us to explore how to enable this trial under the current regulations. We look forward to sharing results as the trial progresses.”
