Nest Insight

What can the UK learn from the United States’ experience of legislating to include emergency savings alongside retirement saving? Since the beginning of our work on short-term savings, Nest Insight has been looking across the pond to the US, where forward-thinking organisations have also been working to increase the financial security of low- and moderate-income households. In 2022, the US Congress passed the SECURE 2.0 Act, establishing Pension-Linked Emergency Savings Accounts with an indexed value of up to $2,500 and enabling $1,000 penalty-free access to pension savings in case of a financial emergency. The landscape of workplace emergency savings solutions has been evolving with innovation from both providers and employers. Join us for an online event with experts from the US system to hear more about the legislation, its practical implications, and potential lessons for the UK’s financial resilience agenda. 👉 Register now to secure your spot: https://lnkd.in/dmXvtVE #EmergencySavings #RetirementSaving

Join us for this online event with experts from the US system to hear more about the Secure 2.0 legislation, how it is playing out in practice and to draw out potential lessons for the UK’s financial resilience agenda.

We are thrilled to announce that The BlackRock Foundation has committed £1.5 million to Nest Insight to build on our work to boost UK savings over the next three years. BlackRock’s support for Nest Insight has enabled major programmes of trials and research with UK employers and providers, with over 150,000 employees offered workplace savings to date. Their support has enabled us to build the evidence base that opt-out payroll saving is a popular, powerful and proven way to boost financial wellbeing. So we are excited at the continuation of our long-standing collaboration, a partnership that has been in place since 2019.  We are looking forward to continuing our work together to improve financial security for all. Gavin Lewis, Head of Institutional for UK and Ireland at BlackRock, said, ‘I am thrilled to announce this new commitment from The BlackRock Foundation to Nest Insight as part of BlackRock’s Emergency Savings Initiative. At BlackRock, our mission is to help more people achieve financial well-being, and having accessible, liquid savings is a vital step towards building long-term economic security. Nest Insight’s work has demonstrated the effectiveness of workplace savings solutions, yet these remain out of reach for many low- and middle-income workers in the UK. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Nest Insight over the next three years to ensure every worker and family in the country has access to high-quality emergency savings solutions that provide peace of mind and security, today and for the future.’

Would you like to work on making a difference to the financial wellbeing of people in the UK and beyond? Do you have the ability to drive projects to deliver policy and market change to make a positive difference to people’s financial security? Then this is the role for you! Come and join the Nest Insight team. We’re recruiting for two Associate Directors of Research and Innovation: Associate Director, Research and Innovation - (12 Month FTC): https://lnkd.in/eJaBsKDq Associate Director, Research and Innovation: https://lnkd.in/edHGjDpw Application deadline: Monday 21 April #recruiting #jobsearch #career #FinancialWellbeing

What can the UK learn from the United States’ experience of legislating to include emergency savings alongside retirement saving? Since the beginning of our work on short-term savings, Nest Insight has been looking across the pond to the US, where forward-thinking organisations have also been working to increase the financial security of low- and moderate-income households.   In 2022, the US Congress passed the SECURE 2.0 Act, establishing Pension-Linked Emergency Savings Accounts with an indexed value of up to $2,500 and enabling $1,000 penalty-free access to pension savings in case of a financial emergency. The landscape of workplace emergency savings solutions has been evolving with innovation from both providers and employers.   Join us for an online event with experts from the US system to hear more about the legislation, its practical implications, and potential lessons for the UK’s financial resilience agenda.   👉 Register now to secure your spot: https://lnkd.in/dmXvtVE   #EmergencySavings #RetirementSaving

How can employers support the financial wellbeing of their workers?   Since 2021, we’ve been working with employers on the first major trials of opt-out workplace savings. These successful trials have shown that opt-out workplace saving schemes are a powerful, popular and inclusive mechanism to help eligible employees build financial resilience – achieving participation rates of up to 70%. This can have benefits for employers. By helping employees build a savings buffer, employers can enhance their staff’s financial resilience. This can lead to reduced financial stress, which in turn can improve employee productivity and performance at work. Additionally, the opt-out approach is well-received by employees. The majority of employees are happy about or feel neutral about the automatic savings feature. Hear from Katie Duxbury from Bupa about their motivation for joining the trials. https://lnkd.in/eVAGXvei #FinancialWellbeing #EasierToSave #PayrollSavings

Last week, Nest Insight released its latest impact report, ‘Easier to Save’, bringing together the results of its auto enrollment (opt-out) payroll saving research trials. These form part of their workplace emergency savings research programme, which BlackRock has supported since 2019. The findings clearly show the power of opt-out saving via payroll to encourage persistent saving over time. The BlackRock Foundation is proud to be a strategic partner of Nest Insight, and we are delighted to see success in these groundbreaking trials!

We talk a lot in our industry about the gender pensions gap. But that’s just one of the many ways in which women’s financial security lags behind that of men, as my colleague Jo Phillips highlights below. Of course, addressing this requires addressing the gender pay gap, first and foremost. But it also requires putting inclusion at the heart of how we design financial products and services. Something for us all to think about this #InternationalWomensDay.

After over 3 years of research, analysing over 1 million admin data points, 4 big surveys and hours of in depth interviews, I am so proud to have published the full results of our opt-out payroll savings trials at Bupa, Co-op and SUEZ UK this week. We've seen savings participation increase dramatically. We've heard over and again from new savers of the big impacts this small change has had in their lives. Greater resilience, control, peace of mind, confidence... We've learned that this approach is popular and inclusive, reaching people who haven't saved before or who have struggled to do so previously. To learn more, you can now read the report 'Easier to save' here : ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eX9_WDtF At our launch event we heard from the Economic Secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds MP who talked about the cross-cutting relevance of emergency savings within the work to develop a national financial inclusion strategy, and reinforced the connection between supporting financial resilience at a household level and boosting inclusive economic growth at the macro level. In our panel Baroness jeannie drake CBE, Mike Brewer, Sarah McKenzie and Femi A. explored the opportunities and challenges of scaling the approach we've piloted, and the potential to boost UK savings inclusion so that millions more households who currently lack any kind of savings buffer could start to build greater financial security. At this point, with such compelling and exceptional results, it would be easy to pretend that this was always the destination, with a project plan fully mapped out to get us here. The reality of an innovation journey is of course not that! When we started out, we didn't know if anyone would be up for it, if we could make it work in the real world, how employees would respond, if we could get the data... it's been a messy snakes and ladders board, with both set backs and moments of luck. I'm so grateful therefore to the growing community of collaborators who have been with us along the way - it takes a village to raise a... real-world behavioural research trial! To our trial partners Michelle Sutton ChMCIPPdip, FHEA 🟡🔴/🟢🔵 (I will never forget our first conversation!), Lisa Thomas and all at SUEZ, Alex Henley, Alison Scowen, Nick Speight MBE and Claire Costello at Co-op, Katie Duxbury and Helen Spurr at Bupa; Roger Shelton and Ian Sibbald at Transave, Emily Trant, Callum M. and team Wagestream. To our programme partners The BlackRock Foundation and the Money and Pensions Service and our strategic partners BlackRock, JPMorganChase and Nest pensions. To our academic partners Sarah Holmes Berk, Jay Garg, David Laibson, James J. Choi and John Beshears. To everyone else who has advised and encouraged us. To the tenacious and dedicated Nest Insight team, with special and huge thanks to the fabulous Dr Emma Stockdale without whose exceptional work we would not be here.

On Monday, we launched our report Easier to Save to a diverse audience of stakeholders who share the common goal of closing the savings gap. This latest research from our workplace savings programme brings together evidence from trials with major employers over several years. It demonstrates the powerful potential of opt-out payroll savings to improve the financial resilience of households across the UK, as well as contribute to broader wellbeing and economic growth. We were delighted by the enthusiastic response for the work in the room.   It was fantastic to see the ongoing support for scaling workplace savings, and the recognition of the role this could play in supporting multiple government objectives – including as the Economic Secretary to the Treasury described “Ensuring that people have those rainy-day savings in order to withstand a smaller shock, is something I think we should be aiming towards.” Emma Reynolds MP   We also heard a number of reflections about the importance of addressing low financial resilience as part of an inclusive growth agenda that can really improve the financial security and living standards of low- and moderate-income households. A clear next set of steps emerged in the discussion, with a need to set out the next level of detail for how a national system of opt-out payroll savings could work in practice and the principles such a system would need to meet to be able to garner consensus support.   Our huge thanks to our guest speakers for their support and expertise: Baroness jeannie drake, Oliver Morley CBE from Money and Pensions Service, Mike Brewer from Resolution Foundation, Femi A. from Standard Life UK and Diversity in Pensions, Sarah McKenzie from the Financial Conduct Authority and Gavin Lewis from BlackRock.   This work is made possible with the support of our generous partners. We are grateful for the support of all our partners, including our programme partners The BlackRock Foundation and the Money and Pensions Service. And our strategic partners BlackRock, JPMorganChase and Nest pensions. #PayrollSavings #EasierToSave #WorkplaceSavings #EmergencySavings #FinancialInclusion