Coronavirus Crisis: How your Pension Provider should be communicating with you

MATTHEW FEARGRIEVE explains five ways in which your pension provider- and your financial adviser- should be communicating with you during the coronavirus lockdown.

In these days of lockdown and self-isolation, pension providers and financial advisers, like all businesses, have to work harder at reaching out to their clients. Especially when your pension fund is suffering losses in the market turmoil. Now is the time for all financial services firms to be thinking of their clients and how to help them understand the financial impact of the coronavirus crisis on their investments.

Here we explain five key things that your pension provider and your financial advisers (whichever one you have the main relationship with) should be doing during the lockdown to support you.

1. Putting you First. Consider how your daily life and routine have changed during the pandemic. Your pension provider and adviser should demonstrate that they are mindful of this. They should be using distribution channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as email and the telephone, to provide you with regular updates and market commentary as the lockdown continues. There is a lot of panic and fake news circulating the internet, and one of their biggest priorities- after protecting your pension fund’s assets- is to keep you, their client, informed and provided with high quality information about what they are doing to limit losses to your pension pot.
2. Reaching out to you. Your pension provider should understand that you will have lots of things competing for your attention, like your health and the welfare of your family, and so they should ensure that the information they provide to you is given in a convenient way, and in a format that you are comfortable using, for example an email, or a web video. If you feel that you have not heard or received anything from your pension provider or adviser, let them know. It may be that they are sending you electronic communications like email that you did not originally sign up for.
3. Providing you with online information and tools. While many people are more comfortable using traditional methods of communication, like the post and the telephone, the fact of life today is that businesses are…