Financial Education Isn't a Nice-to-Have. It's a Business Imperative.

Published: 2022  |  Perspective updated: 2025

A few years into my time at a large financial services group, we launched a pension education session for our graduates. It ran in our Innovation Lab, and I was genuinely delighted about it.

That might sound like a small thing. A session for a handful of graduates, in one office, on one afternoon. But I think about it now as an example of something much bigger: a financial services organisation choosing to invest in the financial literacy of its own people, not just its customers.

That distinction — colleagues and customers, not one or the other — is one I keep coming back to.

The knowledge gap is bigger than we think

We know pension engagement is a problem. We talk about it constantly as an industry. What we talk about less is how much of that disengagement stems not from apathy, but from genuine confusion.

Research from Aviva found that while more than half of UK adults claim to be knowledgeable about pensions, only a third can correctly identify what a Defined Benefit or Defined Contribution scheme is, and one in five don't know what type of pension they have. That is not a fringe group of people who have opted out of engaging. That is a mainstream reality.

A 2025 financial literacy survey found that only 23% of UK adults achieved a passing score on basic personal finance questions — a sharp drop from 49% the previous year. Among 18 to 24 year olds, just 9% passed. Over half said they did not understand pension planning at all.

These are the same people sitting in graduate schemes, starting their working lives, automatically enrolled into pension schemes they have never been taught to understand. The industry has done a good job of getting people into pensions through auto-enrolment. It has done a much less consistent job of helping them understand what they have been enrolled into, or why it matters.

The colleague piece gets overlooked

When we talk about financial education in financial services, the conversation almost always centres on customers. That makes sense. But I think the colleague piece gets underestimated, and sometimes skipped entirely.

There is something slightly strange about working in an industry that manages billions of pounds of other people's money, while many of the people who work in it haven't had a meaningful conversation about their own financial future. Not because they aren't intelligent or interested, but because nobody has made the time.

In 2024, 40% of UK employees reported living paycheque to paycheque, with eight in ten not saving enough for retirement. Those employees exist inside financial services firms too. Providing a graduate pension session wasn't just a customer engagement initiative dressed up as an internal one. It was a genuine acknowledgement that the people who work for you deserve to understand the product they are contributing to every month.

The same research found that employees with financial problems have 2.3 times higher levels of anxiety or depression, are 1.7 times more likely to miss work, and 1.6 times more likely to be looking for a new job. The business case writes itself, and yet financial wellbeing still tends to sit lower on the agenda than mental health or physical health support, despite being deeply connected to both.

What good financial education actually looks like

In my experience, the sessions that land are not the ones that explain pension mechanics with slides and jargon. They are the ones that start from where the person actually is.

A graduate who has just started their first proper job is not thinking about decumulation. They are thinking about whether they can afford rent and whether the money leaving their pay packet every month is going somewhere sensible. Meet them there first. The pension conversation follows naturally once the foundation makes sense.

Employers are uniquely positioned to deliver financial education at the moments when their employees most need it — starting work, changing jobs, becoming parents, approaching retirement. Those moments are not random. They are predictable, and financial services organisations in particular have the expertise to build education that fits them.

A YouGov survey commissioned in 2025 found that 91% of UK adults believe we are failing future generations if we don't equip them with financial literacy, and 80% wish they had received proper financial education at school. Most of them didn't get it. Which means the workplace — for many people — is the first real opportunity to fill that gap.

The customer parallel

Everything I have just said about colleagues applies directly to customers too, with one added complication: you have far less context about where they are and what they already know.

The pension customer who hasn't logged in for three years is not necessarily disengaged. They might simply not know what logging in would show them, or why it would help. The customer who doesn't increase their contributions isn't necessarily making a considered choice to prioritise the present over the future. They might just not have a clear picture of what the future looks like.

This is where the design of financial education matters as much as the content. Information sitting in a portal that nobody opens is not financial education. A letter written in industry language that most people don't speak is not financial education.

Scottish Widows found that adding modelling tools, personalised nudges and open finance features to their pension app led to exponential growth in member engagement — monthly transactions more than trebling in the year to November 2024, then almost doubling again in the following seven months. That is what happens when you design for how people actually behave, rather than how the industry assumes they should.

What I believe now

Running that graduate session in the Innovation Lab felt meaningful at the time, and it was. But looking back, what mattered most was not the content of the session. It was the signal it sent: that understanding your financial future is not something you should have to figure out alone, and that your employer has a role in helping you do it.

That signal matters for customers too. The financial services firms that will earn genuine long-term loyalty are not necessarily those with the best products. They are the ones whose customers feel informed, understood, and equipped to make decisions with confidence.

Financial education is not a box to tick in an annual report. It is one of the most direct ways this industry can make good on the promise of actually helping people — colleagues and customers alike — secure better financial futures.

We just have to mean it when we say it.