Retirement income infrastructure. In your brand.

£70.9bn

accessed from DC pots in 2024/25, up 76% in six years

961,575

pots opened up for the first time

77%

of unretired DC savers aged 40 to 75 have no plan for how they will take their money

21%

do not know there is a choice to make at all

The gap opens before anyone retires. Even after the wake-up packs and guides, 77% of unretired DC savers aged 40 to 75 have no plan for how they will take their money, and 21% do not know there is a choice to make at all.

Then the income starts and all that remains is a payment instruction and an annual statement, across two decades of difficult financial decisions, at the age when people need more support, not less.

The money is moving faster every year. £70.9bn was accessed from DC pots in 2024/25, up 76% in six years, across 961,575 pots opened up for the first time.

Behind them sit the millions already in payment, for whom contact thinned out years ago and has never been rebuilt.

01

Keeping assets and customers

Every contest in this market comes down to a thin margin. A rate. A price. A default option. Whatever you are competing on, the open market has it too, and at the annuity fork, nearly two thirds of your own customers now take their money somewhere else. Your outflow is a competitor's inflow, won on rate alone, because that's all you both have to put on the table. And the PCLS goes regardless.

02

Evidencing outcomes

The regulator has stopped asking whether customers were offered a choice. It is asking what happened to them afterwards. Value for Money, guided retirement and Consumer Duty are three expressions of one movement, and which of them binds you depends on what business you run. The direction of travel is the same, and they all rest on evidence of what actually happened to the customer. A monthly payment instruction produces none of it, and a default income solution that issues one produces no more.

03

Servicing an ageing book

Populations arrive in bulk and stay for decades, and the local network that used to serve them has gone. More than 6,800 bank and building society branches have closed since January 2015. Older customers lose more per fraud incident and are more likely to be targeted again. From 6 April 2027, bereavement handling moves onto statutory deadlines, with your own liability if you miss them. All of it arrives as contact and remediation cost that you carry.

04

Growing the relationship

At precisely the age when protection, later-life lending, care and estate decisions arrive, you have limited contact, no consented data and no natural moment to offer anything. You already have the products. You already have forty years of trust. What is missing is knowing which customer needs which one, when, and somewhere to say it.

It is the only thing in retirement a customer touches regularly. What sits on top of it is our joint roadmap: your protection, health and later-life products, offered at the moment of need; a channel through which streamlined advice and financial education can reach someone, delivered under your permissions; a curated marketplace for the practical business of later life, with group purchasing power behind it; rewards and perks in the categories retired people actually spend in; consolidation of the pots still scattered elsewhere; and savings, drawdown and equity release as the wealth outside the wrapper comes into view.

These compound rather than stack. Rewards and the marketplace turn a monthly deposit into a daily habit. The daily habit generates the engagement data. The data tells you which customer needs which product this month, and evidences that the offer was appropriate.

We have a view on the sequence. We are more interested in yours. Our early adopters will get competitive advantage and the most roadmap influence.

The money

More is coming out, sooner, and in bigger single decisions. The average annuity purchase passed £80,000 for the first time in 2025, with sales above £250,000 up 31%. Fewer, larger, more final.

The rates

Gilt yields have transformed the annuity proposition to its strongest since 2008. A market that was quiet for most of the last decade has turned, which makes the decision moment worth more to whoever is standing at it, and competition is fierce.

The experience

The book is ageing, arriving in bulk, and harder to reach every year. From 6 April 2027, inheritance tax on unused pension funds adds new process, liability and volume, landing on its oldest and least digital part.

The legislation

Value for Money data collection opens in July 2027, guided retirement duties phase in for trust-based schemes from 2027, and the first public ratings follow in 2028. Whichever of those applies to you, the evidence has to exist before the window opens.

Early 2027

PensionPay planned launch

6 April 2027

Inheritance tax on unused pension funds

July 2027

Value for Money data collection opens

From 2027

Guided retirement duties phasing in, trust-based schemes

2028

First public Value for Money ratings