Pension tracking tools will still exist sitting side by side with the dashboard, with companies offering these services partnering with firms that are looking to offer commercial dashboard solutions.
Raindrop, which was born out of a pension provider model and turned into a fintech startup, says it will continue to complement pension providers’ branded dashboards, offering members enhanced visibility into their pension pots.
It located over £250m last year with the largest find totalling almost £1 million across 11 pots for a 55-year-old, and the oldest user being 87.
Raindrop co-founder & CCO Vivan Shridharani says: “We are a technology that sits in the background, so we’re a tool effectively. We used to be a pension provider ourselves, and we used to use pension chasing as a kind of way for customers to engage with our product. We’ve changed our business model over the last few years to effectively service pension providers and provide them with the technology.
“The providers have the brand and they have the message, when members log on to their pension provider, they want to be in that ecosystem with the brand that they’ve saved their money with. Our tool will effectively sit side by side and supplement the experience for members to get visibility.
“People trust them and they also have the reach. They can reach they can reach millions and millions of customers and such a tool is quite powerful. So we decided to change our business from being consumer-facing to servicing businesses like a large pension provider so that they can actively provide the solution to their members.”
According to Shridharani, auto-enrolment has boosted UK pension participation but created challenges due to job mobility. With the average worker holding 11 jobs in their lifetime, £31 billion in pensions across 3.3 million pots remain unclaimed.
Shridharani notes rising demand for pension-tracking tools, with over 35,000 users in two years, but stresses the need for better solutions as the issue continues to grow.
He says Raindrop has a roadmap which enhances pension tracing by providing detailed policy information, including benefits, fees, investment details, and comparisons, empowering members to make more informed decisions about transfers, fees, and retirement planning.
Shridharani says: “We don’t just trace the pension, we extract all the policy information and we give it back to the pension provider so that they can display that back to the member, so that the member can make a more informed decision.
“We already include whether the member has benefits and safeguarded benefits and things like that, so that the member can effectively see whether it makes sense to transfer, not to transfer, what the kind of benefits are of that particular policy.
“We’re extending our tool features to also include fees and comparison of fees, so that the member, once they look at the policy, they can kind of see, they can see the fees that they were potentially paying and what other choices they might have.
“We’re also extending our capability to show the investments in which the pension was invested, that will give more visibility to the member, and that will allow the member to make more informed decisions with where they want their pension invested and how that plays out into their retirement.”
Shridharani says: “Our technology allows for all forms of communication, so if a provider uses our technology and their member base needs an SMS update, that comes through us.”
He says the technology supports all forms of communication, including emails and SMS updates, and appeals to a wide range of users, from younger audiences to older individuals.
Shridharani stressed the importance of collaboration, stating, “Pension providers have built trust with their members over years, and it’s important they use more tools in the market to not just engage but add value. There’s a lot of value that can be unlocked through partnerships with FinTech and large pension companies.”