The wins, the dead ends, and the challenges in simplifying the complex
Six months into my new role, it felt like the right time to pay attention to my pension.
With our Workplace Pensions Benchmark just around the corner, I decided to explore BehindLogin’s own workplace pension through Penfold.
This article follows my experience behind-the-login, from increasing contributions and adding beneficiaries to tracing and transferring old pensions. Along the way I found several quick wins, but also a few dead ends that highlight the challenge of balancing simple task completion with the realities of pension complexity.
We’ve published the full Figma journey map. Download to explore every screen, with annotated observations behind-the-login.
App download
The App Store immediately set clear expectations:
- A pension for modern living
- Get started in under five minutes
- Flexible contributions
- Bring all your pensions together
With a 4.8 ★ rating and strong reviews, first impressions were positive.
First impressions
Setup was reassuringly simple.
Rather than dropping me onto a dashboard, Penfold immediately focused on planning. Forecasts, contribution sliders and retirement projections helped me understand where I stood and, more importantly, what I could do about it.
One smart touch was asking whether I had pensions elsewhere. This prompted me to mention an old Scottish Widows pension. They would later use this to personalise their comms.
First impressions = Win.
Change contribution
The onboarding successfully convinced me to increase my contributions.
An in-app calculator made the impact easy to understand and updating my contribution took only moments.
The challenge came with understanding salary sacrifice, tax efficiency and the impact on mortgage affordability – this quickly moved beyond what the app understood about my personal circumstances. I found myself leaving the journey to do my own research.
This felt like the perfect opportunity for contextual guidance or a proactive AI assistant capable of explaining the trade-offs.
Changing contributions = Win.
Understanding salary sacrifice = Dead end, for now.
Pension comparison
A personalised banner immediately caught my attention:
“Scottish Widows might be holding back your returns.”
That was enough to make me click.
Comparing projected returns increased my confidence in my Penfold pension and naturally led me towards considering a transfer.
Comparison = Win.
Add beneficiaries
Completing beneficiary details was one of the simplest journeys in the app.
Given that more than half of people don’t know what happens to their pension when they die, this feels like an area where more education could encourage completion.
It’s a quick win for members and potentially reduces administration for providers.
Beneficiaries = Win.
Transfer old pension
Back on the home screen, a banner reminded me about my Scottish Widows pension.
Before I continued, Penfold asked me to rate the app. The timing was smart. I had already completed several useful actions and, at that point, the experience felt worthy of five stars.
The transfer journey started well, with clear introductory screens and a straightforward search for my existing pension.
Here the difficulty sat in the small print – of other providers. To proceed confidently, I needed to understand charges, guarantees, benefits and any transfer implications attached to my Scottish Widows pension. That meant leaving Penfold and logging into my existing provider, giving Scottish Widows a fresh opportunity to retain me.
Transfer an old pension = Dead end, for now.
Trace old pension
Finding an employer that appeared in Penfold’s database worked well.
Finding one that didn’t… didn’t.
Rather than guiding me towards alternative routes, the journey simply stopped without any further guidance.
I’m now wondering if PensionBee or Penny would be better suited to help me with this capability.
Tracing = Dead end.
Activity & Growth
In addition, the Activity and Growth features should both prove far more valuable once pension balances grow, or additional pensions have been consolidated.
Conclusion
Penfold succeeded in encouraging me to engage with my pension, increase my contributions and finally think seriously about retirement planning.
The challenge came when simple actions met the complexity of pensions themselves. I don’t imagine this is something faced by Penfold alone.
This autumn at BehindLogin we’ll be releasing our annual Workplace Pensions Benchmark, assessing 10 of the leading providers. Penfold won’t be included in this one as we’re focusing on MasterTrusts. But with scoring including task completion, experience design and use of AI, we’ll be taking a close look to see how other providers have performed with some of the tasks explored here.
Access the full user journey
Important note: The Penfold journey map and analysis shown here offers a perspective based on my personal onboarding experience. For benchmark studies and custom research, we work with our global panel of 1m+ research panellists to capture the full user journey. We score providers using our benchmark framework and assess the experiences within our team of specialist UX researchers. This presents an unbiased and representative view of the market.
