30 Jun 2025

Lost pots and digital assistants: Tech innovations solving pensions’ biggest problem

Digital solutions, such as AI, are helping employees consolidate their pensions to give them a better understanding of their financial future.

Pensions have needed a tech revolution for years, lagging behind most other financial services.

And this isn’t just about user-friendly interfaces and memorable experiences.

Pensions need tech to make intimidating actions feel second nature and to overcome the inertia of so many pension savers – including your employees.

One of the clearest examples of this is in the case of lost pension pots.

According to our own research, the average person has held five jobs which potentially means five pension pots – each time they move job they stop paying into one pension pot and start another one.

The obvious solution is consolidation, helping people track down and combine their pots.

And to facilitate this not insignificant task, both pension providers and the government are turning to tech.

Pension consolidation is a government priority

The government has a few irons in the fire that aim to simplify pensions.

You’ve probably heard of pensions dashboards, which will show people all their pensions in one place.

And more recently, the government also announced they’ll go ahead with proposals to combine small DC pension pots worth £1k or less.

From 2030 onward, they’ll automatically consolidate small pots into approved consolidator pension schemes, without needing savers to give permission (although they will be able to opt out).

Currently, there are around 12 million small, deferred private pension pots in the UK, worth around £4 billion in total.

That’s a lot of consolidating to do, which pension providers can only realistically achieve at scale with tech interventions.

This could be a problem for older providers, many of whom still run legacy technology that’s not set up for the open infrastructure these processes will require.

But some of the modern, tech-led pensions, on the other hand, are ahead of the curve and already seeing success.

Tech is unlocking consolidation at member level

While the government’s automatic consolidation of small pots will be a great move, it only solves part of the problem.

In addition to the 12 million pots worth less than £1k, there are 8 million pots worth less than £10k – another £26 billion.

To find and combine these pots, savers need to make an active choice and generally do the legwork themselves.

A handful of pension providers already offer digital services to help their members with this.

Granted, at one end of the scale this just means a web page and form to kick off the process, but it’s still an opportunity to remind people of the benefits – reuniting with forgotten money, getting a better view of their total retirement savings, the ease of managing a single pot, and so on.

At the other end of the scale, tech is being deployed to change the journey altogether and remove even more obstacles.

For example, a common stumbling block when consolidating is the need to find old pension paperwork and policy numbers.

So what if that need was removed?

It’s about tech delivering a personalised journey

Tech has to replace manual processes and paper – there’s still too much of this in the industry and generally employees want a totally digital experience.

Instead of having to find their pension policy documents, members should be able to just share their work history and AI will track down their previous pensions for them.

They shouldn’t need to know who their old pension providers were.

And this isn’t a pipe dream, fintech providers like us have already launched digital solutions that are really moving the dial on helping employees consolidate their pensions – this new journey has more than tripled pension transfers across our consumer base.

It’s a simple change on the surface but takes a lot of tech and people power.

And that’s only the half of it.

For instance, we’ve also developed and introduced our very own digital assistant to accompany people on their journey, keep them updated and answer their questions.

If you’d like to know about the tech revolution in pension consolidation, come and see us at the next REBA webinar on 1st July.