It’s not hard to find adverts these days, trying to get you to transfer your pension pot to a different provider. Many of those ads feature cash incentives to try to persuade savers to move their money.

The People’s Partnership, which runs The People’s Pension, wanted to test how people responded to adverts like that, and whether the promise of £100 might get people to swap providers. Would they bother researching whether such a move would be detrimental in the long run?

The results were fascinating. In this episode Phil Brown meets Ruth Persian from the Behavioural Insights Team to talk about what they discovered.

Back in 2015 people were given a whole load of new choices about their DC pensions for the first time. Whether to take a cash free sum and what to do with the other 75% of their pot.

The People’s Pension and State Street Global Advisors came together to follow a group of older workers as they started making those choices and the great thing about this study is that those people have been followed as they’ve gone into retirement.

Now the latest snapshot of their lives has been gathered….9 years on. So, what does it say about their choices, have their priorities changed and what can the pensions industry learn from this insight?

Phil Brown has been talking to Alistair Byrne Head of Retirement Strategy at State Street Global Advisors and Janette Weir, who has conducted the research over the past nine years.

There’s been a real buzz in the pensions world following research by People’s Partnership – who provide the People’s Pension.

The research suggested that people could be left more than £70,000 poorer in retirement because they don’t understand charges when transferring their pension.

Many people who’ve recently transferred didn’t know what fees applied to their old pensions or the new one they’d signed up to. And that lack of transparency might leave them out of pocket in the long run.

So, should charges be more transparent, and how should regulators react to this new evidence?

Phil Brown’s guests are Patrick Heath-Lay from People’s Partnership who commissioned the study and Janette Weir of Ignition House who carried it out.