Engaging pension plan participants: challenges and insights

Registration and coffee

Welcome by Elisabeth Brüggen 
Introduction to the Netspar theme grant: The role of emotions, peer effects and life events by Thomas Post
Presentation

Developing effective communications for aging audiences
Wändi Bruine de Bruin (Leeds University Business School)
Presentation

Professor Wändi Bruine de Bruin holds a Leadership Chair in Behavioural Decision Making at the Leeds University Business School, where she also serves as the co-director of the Centre for Decision Research (www.leeds.ac.uk/decision-research/) She holds affiliations with Carnegie Mellon University, the RAND Corporation, and the University of Southern California. She has been a visiting scholar at the New York Federal Reserve and the Dutch Central Bank. Her research interests include behavioural decision making, risk perception and communication, behaviour change interventions, as well as individual differences in decision-making competence across the lifespan. She has published her work in peer-reviewed journals in psychology, economics, public health, and other fields. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Psychology: Applied, Psychology & Aging, Medical Decision Making, Journal of Risk Research, and the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. She is a member of the Scientific & Technical Committee of the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC), which provides evidence-based advice to international policy makers (http://www.irgc.org/ ). She has contributed her expertise to workshops and expert panels organized by various international organizations, including the current expert consensus panel on the Science of Science Communication at the US National Academies of Sciences.

Nudge or engage? Getting good outcomes for auto-enrolled savers
Matthew Blakstad (NEST Corporation)
Presentation

Matthew Blakstad is the Head of NEST Insight unit at NEST Corporation. Prior to this he was responsible for NEST’s proposition for its members, and for ensuring it met the needs of the new generation of pension savers. He joined NEST from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), where he developed public information strategies for State and Workplace Pension Reform. Before this, he headed up research and communications teams at PwC, Buck Consultants and Talking People.

Break

Decision avoidance in pension decisions
Marijke van Putten (Leiden University)
Presentation

Marijke van Putten graduated in psychology at Leiden University. She received her PhD in Tilburg with her research on the effect of missed opportunities on turning down attractive offers. After this, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Marketing department of the K.U. Leuven. Since September 2009 she works at Leiden University as assistant professor for social and organizational psychology as an expert on Economic and Consumer Psychology.

Her research focuses on decision avoidance and consumer inertia with a special interest in the effects of emotions and uncertainty on inertia. Her research is both theoretical and applied. She published studies on the effects of missed opportunities on decision avoidance, and the role of rumination on emotions and inertia. She recently wrote a report for the Behavioral Insights Team of Economic Affairs about consumer inertia in the services markets and is currently working on projects on Tax Inertia for the Tax services, and a project of Money Wise (Wijzer in Geldzaken) on how to reduce uncertainty and risks for the self-employed.

Financial incentives beat social norms: A field experiment on retirement information search
Inka Eberhardt (Maastricht University)
Presentation

Inka Eberhardt is a PhD candidate at the department of Finance at Maastricht University. She holds a MSc in Economics of Public Policy and Management from Utrecht University and is interested in financial decision-making and behaviour. For her dissertation, Inka works together with the “Bedrijfstakpensioenfonds Detailhandel”, the pension fund of the Dutch retail sector. One research project is on activating pension plan participants to inform themselves about their pension. A second research project is on the relationship between confidence in knowledge and savings behaviour and intentions and a third one aims at analysing giving behaviour in a Dutch game show. Next to her research, she teaches Master courses on behavioural finance and institutional investors.

Lunch

Creating customer enagement in a low-involvement industry – The case of Swedish pension industry
Elina Jaakkola (University of Turku) and David Sorhammar (Uppsala University)
Presentation

Elina Jaakkola is an Associate Professor in Marketing at Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Finland. Her areas of expertise include customer engagement, service experience, knowledge intensive services and solutions, value creation, and service innovation. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals and book chapters, e.g. Journal of Service Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Service Management, Marketing Theory, Journal of Marketing Management, and Scandinavian Journal of Management. She teaches on Bachelor, Masters and eMBA levels about topics related to service and value-based business.

David Sörhammar is Associate Professor and holds a PhD in business studies from Uppsala University, Sweden. He is a member of the Swedish Research School of Management and IT (MIT). His main research interests revolve around the issues of IT, consumers, and value creation, and he teaches students on all academic levels in marketing. He has published several articles in international peer reviewed marketing journals and has presented papers at numerous international conferences.

Advancing the use of peer effects in retirement preparation
Pieter Verhallen (Maastricht University)
Presentation

Pieter Verhallen is a PhD Candidate in marketing at the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics, with a background in entrepreneurship and psychology. Under the supervision of Elisabeth Brüggen, Thomas Post, and Gaby Odekerken-Schröder, he currently works with pension providers on improving pension communication to activate individuals in light of current pension reforms. His research has a special focus on social norms and peer effects.

Break

Optimal asset allocation in 5, 4, 3 …
Chantal Hoet and Rogier Potter van Loon (both AEGON)
Presentation

Rogier Potter van Loon works as a data analyst at Aegon, where he focuses on determining clients’ degree of risk aversion and optimizing their products/portfolio given their risk preferences. He obtained his PhD in Behavioral Finance in 2014. After working as an assistant professor for two years, he joined Aegon in March this year to bring theory into practice.

Chantal Hoet is a marketeer and an expert on pension communication at Aegon. In her role as marketeer she has a broad experience in developing marketing strategies and propositions. In the past few years she’s also been active in pension communication and activation of pension participants. Chantal has done research on pension awareness and how to activate pension participants. Together with a team of researchers (Wiebke Eberhardt, Lisa Brüggen and Thomas Post) at the Maastricht School of Business and Economics (SBE) she won the Wetenschapsprijs 2016 (Science Award 2016) by MOA, the Center for Information Based Decision Making & Marketing Research.

Panel debate
with Celeste de Quelerij (TKP), Alfred Kool (Willis Towers Watson), Kornelis Wetsema (Catapult), Jeroen van den Bosch (AFM)

Celeste de Quelerij  (1969) holds the position of senior consultant pension communication at pension administrator TKP Pensioen since July 2016. She also serves as a Chairman of the communications commission of the Federation of Dutch Pension Funds and is a member of the Sounding board of the National Pension Register (NPR). Prior to that she was practice leader communication and change management at Willis Towers Watson. She assisted numerous pension funds, administrators and other pension related organizations in the field of communication and reputation management. She is frequently asked as a guest lecturer in educational programs and as a speaker for various pension or financial insight seminars and events.

Jeroen van den Bosch (1968) has almost 20 years of experience in the pensions industry. As of 1 September 2010 Jeroen is senior supervisor at the Authority of Financial Markets in the Netherlands at the department on supervision on occupational pensions. Jeroen was 4 years involved in the development of the Pension Communication Act that came into force at 1 July 2016. Apart from this Jeroen is as a pensions actuary active within the Actuarial Association of Europe as the Dutch representative for the Pensions Committee since 2006. However started as a pension and actuarial expert Jeroen is working more and more at the intersection of combining actuarial techniques, pension policy making and pension communication.

Kornelis Wetsema (1969) studied Business Economics and started working as a communication advisor in 1994. In 1996 he became one of the owners of Catapult creative communication in Hellendoorn (with nowadays also an establishment in Amsterdam). He wrote books about communication of governments (Raak!, 2010) and Twitter (Tweets oet Twente, 2011) and gave lots of presentations about those themes. In 2011 his agency worked for a pension fund for the first time en they became specialized in communications about pensions. At this moment Catapult works for more than 15 funds, insurance companies and advisors. Last year Kornelis published ‘Everybody can sell beer’, a book with 15 interviews about pension communications.

Alfred Kool (1956) holds the position of strategic communication advisor at Willis Towers Watson since 2011. Prior to that he was partner at Kool, Baas & De Quelerij, a consultancy for strategic communication advice. Willis Towers Watson acquired the activities and the team of KBDQ. Throughout the years, Alfred advised and assisted numerous pension funds, administrators and other pension related organisations in the field of communication, governance and strategy development. He has been engaged in various communication-roles since 1985, including the position of Director of Corporate Communication at PGGM. He acquired a thorough knowledge of the financial sector, both from an asset and from a liability perspective. Alfred Kool was lecturer at the universities of Nijmegen, The Hague and Nyenrode, and currently shares his knowledge at the Willis Towers Watson Academy. Next to that he is board member of the association of pension specialists (KPS: Kring van Pensioenspecialisten), member of the editorial staff of PBM (Pensioen Bestuur & Management), and initiator of the yearly PBM-Communication Awards. He publishes and presents on communication and governance-topics frequently.

Closing words

Reception