Insights for retirement design and governance.
Explore actionable uses, the relevant regulatory expectations and the evidence institutions can document.
Institutional use: Identify the retirement outcomes that participating members value, including certainty, access and flexibility.
Regulatory connection: Guided Retirement — Pension Schemes Act 2026, s50 (framework; detailed implementation forthcoming).
Evidence for governance: Aggregate priorities, sample size, response period and interpretation limits.
Income for life ranks highest
What this tells you: Security matters, but flexibility and access are nearly as important.
Illustrative demonstration only. Not live client findings or personal advice.
Institutional use: Report the retirement characteristics members value, as complementary context to financial and service measures.
Regulatory connection: FCA Consumer Duty for firms in scope (current); statutory VFM framework developing — not a substitute for statutory VFM metrics.
Evidence for governance: Priority evidence together with clear boundaries of what the survey does not measure.
Retirement value has three dimensions
What this tells you: Value for money should consider what members value, not just what a pension costs.
Looking beneath the headline figures
The three dimensions offer a broad view of retirement value. The priorities and trade-offs within each dimension provide more detail about what participating members say matters to them.
That detail can reveal different needs, raise questions about retirement options and inform trustees' and providers' design and governance reviews. It does not determine which approach they should adopt.
Explore Member priorities and Trade-offs for further illustrations of this supporting evidence.
Illustrative demonstration only. Not live client findings or personal advice.
Institutional use: Use member-priority evidence to inform questions about default objectives, retirement timing and investment glide paths.
Regulatory connection: TPR default investment governance (current); Guided Retirement defaults (framework enacted; detail forthcoming).
Evidence for governance: Priority patterns, design questions and scheme-recorded rationale; PenFit does not select a glide path.
No single retirement approach dominates
What this tells you: Different priority patterns point toward different broad retirement approaches.
Illustrative demonstration only. Not live client findings or personal advice.
Institutional use: Describe where priorities compete, so trustees can test assumptions behind retirement designs.
Regulatory connection: TPR DC investment governance (current); Guided Retirement member-needs assessment (developing).
Evidence for governance: Observed trade-offs, distribution, strength and uncertainty.
Security and flexibility pull in different directions
What this tells you: Both priorities score highly, only 5 index points apart. A default built around security alone could overlook flexibility.
Illustrative relative priority index (0–100), not percentages or live client findings. Higher means more strongly expressed.
Institutional use: Compare expressed priorities with documented features of existing retirement options, identifying areas for further institutional review—not product suitability.
Regulatory connection: Guided Retirement design/review framework (forthcoming detail); FCA product-and-services outcome where applicable.
Evidence for governance: Bounded factual feature comparison, gaps/questions, assumptions and limitations; only where methodology is validated.
29% may favour an approach outside the illustrative offering
What this tells you: This signals a question for proposition review, not a finding of unsuitable products or member harm.
Illustrative demonstration only. Not live client findings or personal advice.
Institutional use: Inform how institutions structure and explain retirement pathways and help members understand choices without PenFit personal recommendations.
Regulatory connection: Guided Retirement communication framework (implementation detail forthcoming); TPR retirement communications; FCA Consumer Duty where in scope.
Evidence for governance: Aggregate needs and comprehension evidence, with scheme/provider ownership of decisions.
Start support with the priority, not the product
What this tells you: Different priorities suggest different support conversations. Here, 41% of fictional responses put income for life first, 34% access, and 25% keeping options open.
Illustrative distribution of the leading support theme across 100 fictional responses, not live PenFit findings or personal advice. Does not represent regulated targeted support.
Institutional use: Examine differences in expressed priorities across defensible member cohorts, where appropriate data and privacy safeguards allow.
Regulatory connection: Guided Retirement — s50 expressly considers membership subsets; TPR DC investment governance.
Evidence for governance: Cohort definitions, variation, data limitations and disclosure safeguards.
How retirement priorities differ by age and gender
What this tells you: The overall 55% conceals a 46-point gap between age bands and a 14-point gap between gender groups. A single membership average can mislead.
Illustrative figures only, not PenFit findings. Age and gender are not collected in the standard anonymous questionnaire; such breakdowns require appropriately sourced data, sufficient group sizes and privacy safeguards.
Institutional use: Produce structured member-priority findings for trustee/provider review, with methodology, limitations and an evidence trail.
Regulatory connection: TPR governance and documented default review (current); Consumer Duty outcome monitoring where applicable; emerging Guided Retirement review duties.
Evidence for governance: Standard PenFit Insights Report concept: source cohort, methods, findings, caveats, decision questions and institution-owned actions.
Show the strength and limits of the evidence
What this tells you: Trustees can see the sample and response rate, but 25% participation does not prove that responses represent the whole membership.
The 800 invitations and 200 responses are illustrative. The 12-question and six-approach structure is part of PenFit. Not live client findings.