PensionBee, Plaid partner for Open Finance

Open Banking has helped make much of consumer finance simpler, turning a paper-intensive, slow industry into an instantaneous digital one. However, pensions are reliant on paper documents and confusing fees, and many owners are in the dark about their balances or how they switch them between jobs. These obstacles undermine people’s engagement with how they plan for retirement. With 9.6 million UK working-age adults not saving into a pension, and many more not saving enough, cutting through the complexity of pension saving is vital.

PensionBee is an online-only pension provider that allows people to combine all of their existing pensions into one platform. With integrations to personal financial management tools like Emma, Money Dashboard, and more, PensionBee’s customers can see their pension balances displayed alongside their real-time current account balances for a holistic picture of their finances. 

Despite progress made toward an open pension system, transferring or contributing into your pension is much more difficult than it should be. Direct Debit can take a significant amount of time to settle. To solve this, PensionBee has teamed up with Plaid for easier, faster account contributions. Rather than typing out card numbers or setting up Direct Debits, PensionBee has enabled a ‘click, confirm, and carry on’ experience using Plaid’s Open Banking platform. As a result, Plaid’s Payment Initiation turns a two-week contribution process into an almost instantaneous one all within the PensionBee app.

In the future, PensionBee will integrate with Plaid’s Open Banking network to allow customers to connect their outside financial accounts with their BeeHive to gain insights on how to grow their money for the future, based on their actions today. With consumer-permissioned access to account transactions via Plaid,  PensionBee will nudge customers on potential ways to increase their contributions based on salary increases or spending and savings habits, and detect new jobs so the old workplace pension pot can be moved into the PensionBee pension.