Clare Reilly, head of corporate development at PensionBee, believes the current challenging economic conditions could lead people to engage with their pensions more closely.

Having noticed a sharp decline in their pensions’ fortunes in recent weeks, people may begin to look more closely at what their money is invested in and what causes it to go up or down.

“We have very low levels of financial literacy in this country and people generally don’t engage with their pensions, which is a well-documented problem,”

Reilly tells Finextra Research. “I don’t think a lot of people really appreciated that their pension was invested in global markets, and so seeing it go down in the last month may have led them to realise it was because it was invested in the S&P 500 and the FTSE 100, both of which had tanked.”

She believes that this may be positive in the longer term for sustainable investing practices, as people being to feel more empowered about who and what they can invest in, just as they do in other aspects of their spending. “I think if we are to look for positives, people are more likely to go on that journey of engagement and may understand more about where their money is going,”

she says. “The next step would be thinking more about what they can do with it if they don’t like what it’s invested in. People have so much power in their life now to remove what they don’t want from the things they buy, whether it be food or clothes or beauty products.

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