Monzo Pension!

Hey everyone. I’m Dani, Product Marketer for Pensions at Monzo and I’ve got some exciting news to share with you all :star_struck:

Today, we’re launching our Monzo Pension! :rocket:

Register for updates now and we’ll let you know as soon as you’re able to open your pension. To help us fine-tune the product, we’ll be rolling out to customers gradually over the next few months. Once you’ve opened your pension and started finding and combining your old pensions, we’d love to know how you’re finding the experience. As always, your feedback can help us make our products even better.

As you know, this is something we’ve been working on for a while. You told us “I would love to see my pension in the Monzo app” and asked, “Any plans to introduce personal pensions?”. To help us do this, we wanted to get to the heart of customers’ pain points around their pension – and retirement more generally too.

When we spoke to customers, having enough money to retire comfortably was one of their top goals, but less than half (41%) were confident that they were on track to hit that goal. And although most of them wanted to take action with their pension, they were overwhelmed by either the admin involved, or the enormity of the decision.

To solve these problems, we wanted to give customers an achievable next step they could take with their pension.

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A new home for your old pensions :house:

Combining your old workplace and personal pensions can help you figure out if you’re on track for the future you want, and make changes if you need to.

But we know inertia is a big issue. Having to rummage through years of pensions paperwork only adds to that. And even if you want to start, you might not know all the details companies want.

That’s why we’ve put a lot of effort into being able to find and combine your old pensions, with just a few details. We can get started, even if all you know is where you worked and when. But the more you tell us, the quicker it’ll be.

We’ve partnered with Raindrop, the pension-finding specialist, to help do the detective work – contacting your old employers and providers, and uncovering your lost pension details.

Once we’ve combined them for you, your old pensions will be all together, in a Monzo Pension, which is a self-invested personal pension (SIPP) – a type of personal pension.

Learn along the way :memo:

Retirement can be intimidating anyway, and all the jargon doesn’t help. We break down important information about pensions into bite-sized lessons, covering topics such as why pensions matter and how we help your pensions to grow.

Customers loved our quick-fire education for Monzo Investments – so we’ve created the same jargon-free, info-packed lessons for pensions too.

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How we help your pension to grow :deciduous_tree:

Your Monzo Pension will be invested in a target date fund, which focuses on helping to grow your money when you’re younger. Then taking care of what you’re building into retirement.

Each fund balances the risk it takes, automatically shifting from higher to lower risk investments over time, using the age you aim to retire as a guide.

The funds are managed by BlackRock. We’ve chosen to work with them again for their expertise as one of the world’s largest fund managers. They manage savings of over 12 million UK pension customers.

Pay transparent fees :moneybag:

As with all our products, there are no hidden fees.

You’ll pay 0.63% of your investment value in fees annually (that’s a 0.45% platform fee and 0.18% fund fee). £10,000 in your pension? You’d pay £62.91 a year (with no growth or withdrawals).

Plus, Premium, Perks or Max customer? Then you’ll pay a lower annual platform fee of 0.35%.

Your fees accrue daily, and are charged monthly.

Register for updates :bell:

You can now register for updates and we’ll let you know when you can combine your old pensions into a Monzo Pension.

To make sure we can learn what’s working and give you a better experience overall, we’ll be letting people in gradually over the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can give our bite-sized lessons a go and find out more on the Monzo website.

Register now in the app.

It’s important to be sure that combining your pensions is right for you. We’ll let you know the key things you need to think about before we get started.If you’re unsure about what’s right for you, speak to a regulated financial adviser. They’ll be able to guide you through your options and give you advice based on your personal circumstances.

You can find regulated and impartial advisers through the MoneyHelper website. Or, if you’re over 50 you can get free and impartial guidance through Pension Wise.

The value of your pension may go up or down and you could get back less than put in. You need a free Monzo current account to open a Monzo Pension. 18-70 years old only. UK residents only. Ts&Cs apply.

Let us know your thoughts and feedback in this thread. As always, the team and I will be around to answer questions.

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Do you guys disclose/share what sectors/investments the money goes into? For example like Vanguard does below.

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Wooo! Nice to see another product being released by Monzo! :fire:

Now that costs are laid out, I may actually have to reassess my current pension provider… they charge 0.75% up to 100k, and 0.4% over 100k with 0.17% paid to blackrock.

Might be a convincer (with investments too) to actually look at getting Perks! :thinking:

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Yuck.

Please let us know when you have some better fund providers to choose from. I really want to leave Nutmeg, but for someone ethically better, not worse.

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Done a little digging here as I swore that BlackRock don’t do pensions anymore. And they confirmed over the phone that they handed this over to https://www.aegon.co.uk/ is this the case here as well? Unless they just don’t let personal people use BlackRock anymore

Unless this isn’t a specific pension offering by Blackrock, but an investment account with the “pension” side of stuff managed by Monzo?

There are other companies out there that offer Blackrock backed pensions too.

Ah, so its not fully managed by BlackRock then

A target date fund is a bad option for many people given that few people go for annuities these days and target date funds are geared towards people who will take an annuity.

BlackRock don’t need to do pensions themselves. The pension is just a wrapper around the investment and someone else can provide the wrapper.

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Are there plans to allow us to just view our current pensions in the app? Or only if we transfer them over to Monzo?

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As an investor, glad to see Monzo diversifying into more products :+1:

However, for my own needs consolidating my various pensions into a single SIPP isn’t really what I’m personally interested in. What I am interested in though is being able to see my various pensions in a single aggregator/dashboard (similar to bank account aggregation in Monzo Extra/Plus/Premium). Thus am curious if you are also considering becoming a pensions dashboard provider: https://www.pensionsdashboardsprogramme.org.uk/connection/ecosystem

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They’ve not finished connected accounts yet I’d rather them not start new integrations :grimacing:

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They will almost never have all possible UK accounts ever (nowhere does) so you’ll stagnate Monzo completely with that logic.

Yep, I want to see my vanguard pension and S&S ISA in Monzo.

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I don’t mean that they’ve not added every account, I’m just referring to the accounts that have been in labs for over year and the Virgin account that was almost done but has stalled and the communication about it has stopped. Some connected accounts also break trends so that really needs tidying up.

The way Monzo is structured it’ll be completely different teams anyway - not doing pension integration won’t make Virgin integrate any faster.

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Well I think the problem is that the teams that were working on connected accounts and the new UI are now working on other things which is why development has stalled.

Now that all these new features/accounts are out I’d rather they do back and finish the things they’ve already released than start something new.

But this is for a different thread really.

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When you’re finding existing pensions will you be able to show the current fee that is being paid to help understand if it is beneficial moving/consolidating?

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I’m not sure that’s always possible. My main pension is with a fixed fee provider with a mix of different funds with different fund fees :grimacing:

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Very minor typo on this screen. A missing ‘be’ in the text at the bottom.

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