Pensions engagement with Nick Laws of Nest & The Centre for Inclusive Money

Episode transcript

Amelia

Hi there, I'm Amelia.

Paul

I'm Paul.

Amelia

And this is Fin the Week. Welcome back to another episode. I'm very excited to have a guest this week. Nick Laws, welcome to the show. How are you?

Nick

I'm really good, thank you for inviting me.

Amelia

Well, we're so pleased to have you here. So you're the head of brand delivery at the Centre for Inclusive Money, which until a little while ago was known as Nest Insight. So for anyone who doesn't know you or the organisation, could you give us just a brief overview of what it is that you do?

Nick

For sure. So Inclusive Money is a public benefit research and innovation centre. It used to be called Nest Insight, and it's set up to basically improve financial and household security, and it does that through an amazing range of research and real-life tests, and it works with strategic partners. So Nest — Nest Pensions, as you know — is a strategic partner. It also has the BlackRock Foundation, the Money and Pensions Service, and JP Morgan Chase.

Amelia

And what about you, as head of brand delivery — what does that role involve?

Nick

Yes, quite a lot. It's good — coffees with the team, that's always nice. And I've also worked with you guys a little bit on the website and SEO, and previously worked with you when I was at Nest — I used to work in the brand and creative marketing area. But at the Centre for Inclusive Money specifically, it's been around this brand change — moving from Nest Insight to the Centre for Inclusive Money. We had an agency helping us called IE Brand with the brand strategy — a fantastic team based in Birmingham — and then a fantastic team within Nest and also the Inclusive Money team. Together we changed the name, the visual identity, the visual language, a lot of the tone-of-voice work, the messaging matrix, and so on. So it's been quite full-on, but it's been absolutely fantastic, and a super-lovely team to work with.

Amelia

So, a big job. Today we're going to cover a lot of ground, but we're going to start with a common challenge: how do you get consumers to engage with a product they tend to avoid — in this case, pensions? Why are pensions and pension engagement such a difficult problem?

Nick

Well, it is a difficult problem, there's no doubt about that. I think it's partly about trying to understand your future self — visualising where you're going to be at the point you want to take a pension, and then understanding what a pension actually is. Because for a lot of people it's just not everyday stuff you think about. Until I worked at Nest, I was in that same boat of not fully understanding what this was about. So let me give it some context.

You've got private workplace pensions. You cannot access those until you're 55 — that's the case at the moment, and it's going to go up to 57. With workplace pensions you put money in and normally it's invested, but there are two types of pension: defined benefit and defined contribution. Defined benefit is all around a calculation of years of service, accruals and final salary. Defined contribution is where you're putting money in and it's being invested. So already you've got these two things which are quite complex to understand. And why would somebody starting out in the workplace want to understand all of that? There are branches of it, and it gets bigger and bigger. So effectively, communicating around something where you're going to have money when you stop working is quite a difficult concept.

The other part of this is that you have a state pension. At the moment that's around £12,000 a year. So you could shock people and say, "Okay Amelia, if you stopped working tomorrow and started on your state pension, that's your salary until you die" — that's quite a hard message. So you've got these other vehicles to complement that: your workplace pension, or a private pension you might save into. All of this is difficult because it's finances, it's life, it's where you are in life — it's trying to understand why you need to do this now, for later, when you don't know what later is going to look like. So it's already a really complex situation.

And in the case of Nest — Nest doesn't have shareholders, so it's not-for-profit — in 2008 the Pensions Act was revised, and the government said that by default it would be law that employers have to enrol their employees into a pension scheme. That was a really, really big help, and Nest was a big player when that happened, helping to bring employers on board and enrol them into a pension scheme. But if you don't have a product that's like a private product you can buy — which is the case with Nest — you've got another kind of complexity around it. The idea behind auto-enrolment is this idea of inertia: you don't need to do anything, because by default you're getting this pension. You might not even be aware it's happening. If you had a student job or a starter job, you might not even know what that deduction is on your payslip, but it's just happening. And that was a good thing in a way, because people were starting to save for the future without even knowing it.

But I think in communicating all of this there's a fine balance, because if you say too much about it, people think, "I want the extra money," particularly at a younger age, and opt out — which you can do. So the communication, particularly for pension schemes like Nest, is a little more nuanced. It's not just a straightforward B2C or even B2B setup.

Amelia

Certainly not straightforward. And I wonder — how hard is it to get creative ideas signed off around this? Do rules around financial promotion stifle those campaigns? That must be a really big consideration.

Nick

It's a really interesting one. I think, particularly at Nest and Inclusive Money, it's never really the creativity or the campaigns that are the issue — it's more around what you're allowed to say. If you go back to what a pension is, it's effectively an investment. Investments go up and they go down — you can never guarantee they're going to go up. You want them to, and the track record for Nest is really good, but you can't know for certain, you don't have that certainty. And so there are rules around what you can say.

So if you were doing a campaign and wanted to say something along the lines of, "Watch your pension grow, and plan for what you're going to do later in life" — you can't know that that's actually what's going to happen. So it's really around the nuance of the language. In terms of creativity and visualisation there's an awful lot you can do, but the wording is quite tricky.

Here's a rather technical example: if you were talking about pension contributions, standardly there are three types. So, Amelia, you put some money into your pension pot, your employer puts some money into your pension pot, and you get tax relief on top of that — and then you get a total amount. If you describe it the way I've just done, that would actually be incorrect, because the tax relief is only on the amount of money that you put in. So you could mislead somebody — the way I've said it, it sounds like you just add those three things together, but actually it gets more technical further down the line. If somebody said, "Well, I put this in, and you told me I've got this relief, this free money effectively from the government" — it should be more than that, because it's based on those two things specifically. So there's a lot you have to be aware of, and a lot of compliance and governance rules. You can come up with something you think is fantastic — a really good way of saying something — and then it comes back from compliance saying, actually, we can't say that.

It's also, when you're working with something like a not-for-profit — well, we do make money, but we invest it back in for our members, so it's always to the benefit of the member, and that's always behind everything you communicate. That's a slightly different nuance to, say, a fast-moving consumer goods brand, which will have a very different take on how it promotes and advertises things.

Amelia

One of the projects that jumps out is your work with Aardman. So what was the aim there? What did it involve?

Nick

So that was fantastic — you can go to the Aardman offices in Bristol, and there's — you can see Morph, if you remember Morph, you can see the Gromit character and so on, and just an absolutely wonderful team. That was really about brand awareness, that's what it was. It was a national campaign to let people know that Nest exists, and this is what we are — and finding a way to do it that was warm and friendly, which was really our brand ethos.

So if we go back to what we were saying earlier about auto-enrolment and this idea of inertia — certainly for Nest, going back some years, the pensions landscape was a bit different. We weren't advertising because we didn't need to; we were active in certain areas, but it wasn't a big national thing. Now that landscape has changed, and there are lots of disruptors and competitors that might be tempting for members to move to, but perhaps not in their best interest. So having a brand campaign and letting people know who we are is really, really important. If you trust your brand, you can do more with them, but you've got to know the brand is there. We were starting from a really low base at that point — brand awareness wasn't as good as it could have been.

So, working with Aardman, we looked at what we could do that would be interesting. And obviously with Nest, you can do a play on words — a bird's nest, and the logo for Nest is an egg — so it was kind of a no-brainer. My previous boss came up with this fantastic idea of approaching Aardman around the idea of distinctive brand assets. Aardman obviously create these cartoon characters, and they do claymation, so we went with them and started to develop a story that could include our members using these characters. We wanted something that was really humorous, so Aardman just seemed like the perfect match.

Amelia

And that must have been very rewarding for you, to see that project come together and see the success it had.

Nick

Yeah, it's fantastic. I was on that project for a year, working as head of creative, and a lot of the work was around producing the story, the materials, the output — how it could be used on the web, how we'd use it in video, and so on. And the contract with Aardman around licensing those characters and how they could be used. Will was the director, and we had Melissa as producer from Aardman. Lovely, lovely team, a wonderful way of working. We went up to the studios, used a CGI technique to produce the films, then went up for the grading and so on. So you really got a hands-on feel for how it's done, with lots of discussion and thinking around how the character was portrayed and how the human was done. We got Bill Bailey to do the voiceover as well.

Amelia

Wow, how cool.

Nick

It was kind of like inter-birds and stuff, and there was some sonic branding as well — a little bird whistle. So it was a lovely, lovely project to do.

Paul

I wanted to ask, because I find the auto-enrolment pensions thing fascinating — it started out as a mission to get more people saving into a pension, and that's been a success, really. I was just glancing at some stats, and I think it's gone up from 40% of people to something like 90-odd percent now. But then, obviously, the challenge has now moved on to engagement — how do you get people to actually be interested?

What is it — because you've mentioned inertia a couple of times, that's a common theme — what's the problem with people not engaging with their pensions? What's the risk for them if they don't take any notice of it?

Nick

Ultimately, it's about their well-being, financially. If you've only got the state pension, that's the sum of money you're going to live off, right? The PLSA gives various grades of how much money you need when you stop working — for a modest lifestyle, a moderate one, and then a good lifestyle if you want one. So if you think about the population of the UK, and what will happen when a generation goes into retirement — either they're going to have to continue working, potentially into their 70s, or they're not working, and that will have an economic impact. There's a sociological impact too, and it's not going to be great if people can't afford to live. So the engagement isn't just a nice-to-have because "I want some money when I stop." People don't even realise they'll need money later to keep living. And if they've made no provision for that, how are they going to manage? It's not a small problem.

Paul

Is it common that there are lots of people out there who are automatically enrolled into a scheme, don't give it a second thought, and might be saving but not optimising their investment and things like that? Is that a challenge in the industry?

Nick

Yeah, I'd think so — but I'd also say there's a level of knowledge needed to understand what these different investment funds do. That's why doing a campaign like the everyday investor one, for example, broadening people's knowledge that if they're saving into a pension they're effectively investors too, helps bridge that gap and build some awareness.

You can go to financial advisers for advice on how to invest for the long term, but low-to-moderate earners probably can't afford to do that — they're probably more worried about whether they can fix the washing machine if it breaks down. With the cost-of-living crisis, everything's getting more expensive, there's a lot of pressure. So you could be a moderate earner, forget that you're paying into this pension, and then when retirement comes — happy days, you've done really well without even realising it. Or it could go the other way.

Paul

Yeah — talking about the different brands and their pitches, there are a few different angles for people who have pension pots they're maybe not engaging with. First, you can go with the logical argument: engage with this, get it into the right funds, and make more money in the long term. Or you could appeal to the admin side — you've moved jobs a couple of times, you've got three pots with different companies, so consolidate them to make it easier to manage. And then there's probably a more emotional pitch, which is maybe what your Aardman campaign was tapping into — that we're not this big corporate, business-suit type of company, we're doing this for the greater good.

Have you experienced those different pitches, and what do people tend to respond to best — or is there maybe not a clear answer?

Nick

I guess it's down to segmentation, and where you are. If you tend to be earning quite well, you're more likely to already be thinking about consolidation, or the fund that's going to give you the best return. So it depends on the audience, I think. But I guess it's about the number of people who sit in each of those categories, and I'd guess the larger number sits in the low-to-moderate earner category. That doesn't mean you can't make money and do well just by not thinking about it and leaving it as it is — any pension scheme is great, it's going to be good, because you're building up your savings for later. But I think it's probably just down to that type of thing.

I worked at the Royal Bank of Canada in Investor Services — wealth management there is a very, very different concept to what we do at Nest, completely different, miles apart. So that's just an interesting way of looking at what resonates with different individuals, what they're going to respond to. They're different things.

Amelia

And Nick, you touched on your everyday investor campaign there — I love this. Tell us a bit more about it.

Nick

Yes — so the everyday investor campaign was set up by the social media team, a fantastic team, and they came up with the idea for engaging people. A lot of people just didn't know they were investors — that having a pension scheme at Nest meant they were actually investors. I think we did a survey, and something like half the respondents had no idea. So again, it's a knowledge thing around financial acumen and pensions.

So the idea was: how can we relate this back to people, that they are investors? Abby was pivotal to this — she was social media manager, and she was looking at what was trending on social media. A lot of it was around baking — loads of recipes, the bake-offs, that kind of thing. And of course you can start to use influencers.

So they thought about what ingredients Nest invests in — and actually it's things like Cadbury's or Kellogg's. So I went to an agency, found an influencer — Candice Brown, who won the Great British Bake Off — and asked if she'd do a video with us. We got members from Nest involved too. It was a banoffee pie with Candice. It was fun, but it also brought home: do you know the ingredients you're using? You're actually an investor in this. And people were like, "Well, how?" And then we explained it. It was a really nice way to bridge the gap between being an investor in a pension scheme and something that was just fun, not your everyday kind of thing you'd think about.

Amelia

No, I was going to say, I just thought it was so lovely — it was so warm and relatable. And to have those conversations — I mean, people avoid, people don't want to have these conversations — but to have them in that really relaxed way, I just thought it was brilliant.

Nick

Yeah, no — there was a lot of fun. There's a whole series of them that they did. My team worked on producing the creative after the agencies had done their bit, and we put these out and worked on integrated campaigns. We had an email send — I think it was something like 600,000 emails, and we had a 65% open rate, and I think it was an 11% click-through rate on that particular batch. And I think part of that is: if you get an email from your pension provider, you're not expecting it to be about recipes — you're expecting it to be about something you might have seen on TV. All that helps — you've got this little clue, and they might investigate a bit more. It might just sit in their mind, something about investment and these ingredients, and it might feel good. And if it feels good, you want to engage a bit more with it. So all these things help, they all sit together in the bigger picture — and, you know, brand building is a long-term game, you've got to do it over time and build it up and build it up.

But it was just a wonderful way to do it. I think, overall, that particular segment might be aware of investing but have never done it, or don't fully understand the mechanisms or the language involved. So finding a fun way in isn't a bad thing — it's a nice way to start getting into it.

Amelia

And what I thought was really lovely about it as well is — often you see things with influencers and it sounds like they're just reading off a script, like they've been wheeled in to do this thing. But I loved this because Candice sounded really engaged and interested. It felt really genuine.

Nick

Yeah, do you know what — we've had other influencers as well, and when you talk about pensions, it's not something any of them have really thought about. So it actually really engages them — like, "Is that what it is? What is my pension? How much money have I actually got?" Because they don't know. So it's kind of a fun thing. Yeah, you couldn't do anything more fun than a bake-off. I actually applied to do the bake-off myself, on national TV.

Amelia

You?!

Nick

I got so far through it, and then you have to do a video interview — and they, they're allowed to keep all this stuff, you sign a waiver, but then they wanted rights to talk about your personal life and things going on, and I was like, no, that's going too far. I'll do the cookery, but I'm not doing more than that. So I just stick to helping at Southern Cathedral — every Christmas and Easter I do something like 500 cookies — feed the 5,000, it's 500.

Amelia

That's amazing.

Paul

Wow.

Nick

That's why I stopped it, yeah.

Amelia

And as you're serving the cookies, are you talking to everyone about pensions?

Paul

Yeah.

Nick

No, absolutely not. If anything, it's like, "Have you got any vegan? Have you got gluten-free?" It's like, "Yeah, I'll do that."

Amelia

That's something we've kind of touched on before, haven't we, Paul? What does it take to get the best out of a creative team, particularly when working in a regulated space like financial services?

Paul

It's quite a dry subject, isn't it?

Nick

It is a dry subject, and like we've said, it's also a bit complex, it can be a bit technical. I think there are two things there. I've worked with the team — or the team's transformed over various years — for probably about eight or nine years, and it's easy to become institutionalised, right, because you're going into work and doing it every day. I think one of the things that helps is, firstly, to talk about what the business does. So if I talk to the team about pensions, that gives us a bit of an anchor — do we actually know why we're here, what we're doing, do you understand pensions, do you know about them? Let's have that chat, that helps.

Then, I think, we used to run something called a Design Lab, where we'd look at what was going on in the world — it could be absolutely anything — what things did we like, what things would make a difference, what would we like to do with the creative that's perhaps a bit out there and a bit wacky. There are two things to that: if you're dealing with a creative team, you've got designers and writers, but you might not have a creative strategist, so you might need to develop the ideas together as a team. We found we were always bubbling up these little ideas and thinking, how do we get them over the line? A creative team, certainly one working in financial services or a corporate industry, will often be downstream of a briefing system — they'll be receiving briefs: work on this, do that. So how do you get your own ideas out there? If you're not necessarily the marketing person for a particular topic, but you're a videographer or in motion graphics and you've got ideas about how to communicate the subject, how do you get that through, how do you make it go upstream? That's a bit of a challenge, and a lot of it comes down to stakeholder management, collaboration, and having the time to develop those ideas.

Any studio will tell you it's really difficult, because you've got the list of jobs coming in that you've got to get done. But if you're going to do your own development work, that needs space and time, and you don't necessarily work in a methodical way, because you're trying to think up ideas — you might go into Firefly and do some Gen AI work on a particular subject. I did that with some of the Aardman stuff, for example. You might be thinking about other bits, finding something, and then presenting it back and saying, "Can we look at this?" — without trying to take over what those other functions do. It's a fine line, but a good one, because you're expanding your thinking, and that's where all the creativity comes from. It might not get used this time, but maybe next time, or the idea could be repurposed for something else. It's hard in a big corporation, with lots of people, lots of players, deadlines, production — you've got to find a way to fit it in. But even if you can't realise those ideas straight away, they're still there, and that really helps, I think.

Amelia

And you mentioned AI there — and this is something we've spoken about a lot, haven't we, Paul? So, what has been the impact of generative AI on creative teams in general, on your creative team?

Nick

Yeah, I mean, it's not bad, it's good — I'd certainly say it's a toolkit. Where you get into stuff like what we're doing with Aardman, you've got very strict licensing agreements around those distinctive brand assets, and if you want to use generative AI for design work, you've got to be really careful about how you do that and what it does. You can put in a reference image and Gen AI can come up with a creation you want, but every time you iterate on that creation it adapts a bit more, and it can drift off into a very particular, stylised way of doing something. You're also not necessarily going to get layers with that — you'll get a flat design. So you've got to think about how you can use it alongside other elements. Typically, if you've got a cut-out of a character, for example, you'll have an exclusion zone, and you cannot manipulate anything within that without breaching the licence agreement. So Gen AI, in that sense — a lot of people say, "Well, make it do this and that," and even if you could, you're not allowed to. You have to think about how that works.

But I think within the creative team and the creative tech stack, AI is absolutely brilliant, and the overall ecosystem of what you could do now is fantastic. For example, it can support your workflow — you can create an agent that goes through a brief and ascertains certain elements you might need. If you've got a brand portal — we use the Frontify brand portal at the Centre for Inclusive Money — there's loads you can do with that. You've got your assets, your brand guidance, and these are all reference points an agent can use. You think about something like Copilot — it uses ChatGPT and loads of other language models to do its AI — you can connect through that and say, "I want to do an everyday-investor-style campaign, and these are my objectives." You create an agent, and when you put in the prompt it references everything you've done before and starts to produce things. Then you've got other add-ins — things like Adobe Express, Canva — which have templated social media post sizes, or their own brand toolkit, and you can connect those into your workflow so it's not just about producing elements for design and copy, but putting them into the format you need.

You can then run an approval process through AI too — you could say, "My standard template looks like this," and get an agent to check what someone's produced: is the logo in exactly the right place, is that the tone of voice we use, is that the right name? But none of this is ever the end product — it's just a toolkit to help you get there. If you were, say, NatWest, with banks on the high street, producing posters and a lot of print collateral as well as digital collateral, having an AI workflow in your ecosystem is probably going to really help, because otherwise you're doing everything as a manual check. So I don't think we'll ever replace design, design influence and creativity in that way — but I think it's a massive toolkit to support everything around it, to help you get where you want to be.

Paul

Since you've just recently gone through a rebrand exercise with the Centre for Inclusive Money — did Gen AI play a part along the way with that? Did it help with creating or refining the brief, or reviewing the output, anything like that?

Nick

Yes, I used it a lot for research. When we were looking at the name and researching what it should be, I used AI in Excel to do some assessment and a kind of visual mapping of the popularity of the names, and their usage. We didn't use it for the logo creation, but what we did do — we had a launch event, and I referenced previous events, put it into Firefly and said, "I need a celebration cake based on these." What it produced was a cake — it took images of the people from Inclusive Money, turned them into icing figurines, and put them on the cake as part of the celebration. It looked like somebody had actually made this cake. The idea was to have a cake like that at the launch event, and it was fantastic, but we couldn't get a cake made to look like that — it was going to cost too much money. So we did little bits like that. It was also a helper for assessment and production of things, but we didn't get it to actually create the final product — we used humans for that.

Paul

Yeah, I think that's the big debate, isn't it? It's sort of, how far do you take it? Because the big fear, the thing that gets talked about a lot, is that it's going to replace people on creative teams. But I guess, from your experience, it's proving to be a really useful tool for an existing team.

Nick

Yeah, absolutely. I also think it does make mistakes — I've seen that. You have to check things; in your prompts you can say, "Do not add any other information that's not already provided, from A, B and C," but I've had a couple of things come out as gobbledegook, unfinished sentences and so on. So it's not absolutely foolproof. I don't know that you get that if you think about the human touch — it can definitely replicate, but it's only ever as good as what you put into it. It can come up with something, but I still think you need a human view on the creative to be able to say, "Yeah, that hits the spot." You can get very close.

And then there's the production work you might do afterwards. If you do an AI creative, you always need the elements that built that creative. So if you think about claymation, it uses spotlighting, texturisation — an enormous number of filters have gone into creating that look. With a flat file, it's really hard to manipulate it in any particular way afterwards, and I don't think we're quite there yet in being able to do that. Even to the level of, say, the raw filters for grain in Photoshop — I think it can replicate the flat-file look based on the prompt, but if you want 20 layers in a Photoshop file that you can then manipulate, we're not in that space yet. And we'd need to be, I think, for it to be of absolute value.

Amelia

Nick, what's it like working on a mission-led brand, and how is that different to other roles you've had previously?

Nick

You don't have any corporate monsters, which is really refreshing — that's a really lovely thing. What you notice with the people you work with is that it's all human connection. The people I've met at Inclusive Money are just top of their game, really, really good, and they've got a higher emotional intelligence too, which is lovely, working with colleagues who are just really level.

It's really nice. I suppose you don't have certain pressures in the same way you might working for a commercial organisation — the targets you have to hit are a different kind of target, and the impact of hitting them or not is different too. So there's a difference in pressure. I'm not saying it hasn't been pressurised, but it's got a different value behind it. So overall I think it's a very nice thing to do, if you can, in your career. It feels good, it feels worthwhile, which is lovely — it's not just a job, you're doing something worthwhile, which is really nice.

Paul

There was a phase the internet went through where people would say every business, every organisation should have a mission — "mission-first" was a bit of a trend. In your experience, is that realistic, or is that just noise you get online?

Nick

I think, if you're going to talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk. If it's not evidence-based — if you can't prove it, if it's just talk — people see through that.

You have to have a purpose, don't you? Why does it matter? That's the key thing — why does any of it matter, what's important about it, what resonates with people, why should you do it? I think that's at the heart of it. There's a lot of talk out there, and I think AI is generating a lot of it too — you see people posting on LinkedIn, "I'm pleased to announce that..." Who talks like that? Would you ever come up to you guys and say, "I'm pleased to announce that I made a celebrationary cake over the weekend"? It's just a report. So I think moving away from that is helpful.

Amelia

This has been such a lovely conversation. I don't know about you, Paul, but I've got lots to think about — I'm definitely going to go and think about my pension, 100%.

Paul

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nick

I have a vibe for you.

Amelia

It's been really insightful. And before you go, do you want to play some jargon busters with us?

Nick

Yeah, I'm going to lose this, but go for it — go for it.

Amelia

So, if anyone hasn't caught this before — we have a list of industry terms, and every week we see if the guys know what it is, if they can explain its meaning. This week's term is "black swan".

Paul

Hmm, I've heard that before.

Amelia

Any ideas?

Paul

"Black swan event" is what springs to mind — isn't it something rare, out of the ordinary, that happens and affects financial markets? Something along those lines.

Amelia

That's the sort of thing you're going for. Nick, any thoughts?

Nick

Yeah — my thought is absolutely not related, and involves a film called Black Swan, which I think is a kind of horror film as well, towards the end. So, not at all helpful — I think I'd put my money on Paul.

Amelia

Yeah — so, officially, it's an unpredictable, rare event with an extreme impact, like the 2008 crash. So yeah, Paul, you're pretty dead on there.

Paul

I've had a couple of good weeks, I think — lucked out last week as well.

Amelia

You have, you have — you've been revising, Paul, well done. That's about it for today's episode. Nick, thank you so much for joining us, and, as I say, plenty to think about. Thank you so much.

Paul

Yeah, thanks, Nick.

Nick

And I really enjoyed it — my pleasure.