What happened at PensionBee in September 2019

We’ve been working hard this September to bring you some exciting new features, including a new retirement planning tool and improved withdrawals for over-55s. Read on to find out what we’ve been up to this month.

We’ve enhanced our ‘Analytics’ tab to give you a clearer picture of your pension situation, now and in the future

If you’ve logged into your BeeHive in the last few days you may have noticed the improvements we’ve made to the ‘Analytics’ tab. We’ve replaced your old performance chart with an interactive retirement planning tool, to help you better visualise the level of savings you might need for retirement.

Instead of focussing on past performance, your new retirement planning tool is forward looking, and helps you see how much you have now, compared to your target, at a glance. The new tool will let you know whether you’re on track for a comfortable retirement or whether you’ll need to boost your savings to reach your long-term goals.

There are three key elements to the new ‘Analytics’ tab:

• Retirement Planner - a brand new tool that lets you see the level of savings you might need based on your long-term goals
• Transfer and Contribution breakdown - a new snapshot of what’s in your pension pot, based on how much you’ve transferred, contributed and received from HMRC in the form of tax top ups
• Past performance - a refresh of the old analytics chart that now simply shows the growth of your pension pot over time

We’ve increased the efficiency of withdrawals for over-55s

A few months ago we announced that whenever you make a contribution to your pension we will automatically add your ^{_corporation_tax} tax top ups from HMRC, so that you can see the funds reflected in your pension balance straightaway. We’ve now introduced the same improvement for withdrawals so instead of your money taking several weeks to reach your bank account, it will soon take a matter of days.

On average it will take around 10 working days for you to receive your money, as long as there are no issues verifying your bank details. Plus, if you’re making repeat withdrawals to the same bank account(s), you’ll now be able to select your bank details from a drop down menu without needing to input the same information each time.

Remember, you can only start withdrawing your pension after your 55th birthday, and therefore won’t be able to benefit from these new features until then.

Our CEO, Romi, is to help establish the government’s Pensions Dashboards

The way we manage our pensions is changing, with the government planning to introduce an online dashboard that lets you see all of your pensions together – from your old workplace pensions to the State Pension – in the next few years.

While the project is still in its infancy, last week it was announced that our CEO, Romi, would be joining the Pensions Dashboards IDG Steering Group alongside nine others from a diverse range of companies including Which? and Moneyhub. The group has been chosen to represent the interests of consumers, fintechs and the pensions sector, and will be working on the practicalities of establishing pensions dashboards services and making them available to the general public.

As you know, PensionBee is already successfully using technology to help customers like yourselves find and combine their pensions, giving Romi valuable insight into the process. Romi’s appointment will help ensure that consumers have a louder voice in the creation of pensions dashboards and that the end product delivers a service that’s fit for purpose.

Keep an eye out for our next update on our blog. We’re always working on new features to make our customers happy, so if you have any ideas or suggestions, please let us know in the comments section or over on social media, and we’ll feed it back to the team.

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