What is financial resilience?
Financial resilience is the ability to withstand anything that could impact your financial situation and to bounce back from life-altering setbacks that impact our personal finances. It's how well you can absorb, respond to and adjust to a financial shock.
Why does it matter?
Low financial resilience can have a negative effect on your colleagues' day to day life. It can lead to financial worry and increased stress and anxiety, which can affect your colleagues' physical and mental health.
How can it impact the workplace?
Financial worries can lead to lack of concentration at work, impact workplace productivity and in some cases lead to employee absence. This comes at a cost to employers both financially and in terms of group productivity, where employee absence impacts others in the team. Between the years 2020-21, it’s estimated that employers lost £6.1 billion in absenteeism due to poor mental health.1
Helping your colleagues build their financial resilience can help them feel confident making short- and long-term financial decisions allowing them to better manage today's money, while helping them save enough for the retirement they want.
1Deloitte UK Mental Health Report 2022
How can Royal London help?
Research suggests that members who are digitally engaged feel more confident.2 So we've created a number of ways to support your colleagues when they need help strengthening their financial resilience.
2 Royal London Customer relationship study, August 2023
Financial wellbeing service
Our free financial wellbeing service gives your colleagues access to ongoing financial education and guidance whenever they need it - helping them improve their financial knowledge, confidence and wellbeing.
They get access to:
- Free financial guidance and education to help manage debt, budgeting, long-term saving and retirement planning.
- A personalised experience - they’ll only see content that’s relevant to them.
- Interactive tools to help them model different scenarios and understand their retirement options, and the opportunities ahead of them.
- A benefits calculator that can help find any missing Government benefits they could be claiming.
- Guidance that’s easily accessible at any time.
Mobile app
Our mobile app can help your colleagues stay on track with their pension.
With the app, they can:
- See their contributions.
- Stay up to date with their pension savings.
- See their plan value and what it could be worth in the future.
- See where their pension is invested – including fund breakdowns.
- View and add their beneficiaries directly in the app.
- Transfer other pension savings they have to their Royal London plan, if it’s right for them.
- Access free financial guidance through the financial wellbeing service.
Additional financial wellbeing support
In addition to our financial wellbeing service, we also aim to help build financial resilience by sharing information through:
- Our employee hubs – your scheme specific employee hub is a one stop shop to help your colleagues get to grips with their pension. It provides access to a range of articles, videos, and helpful planning tools.
- Our pension webinars - we have a range of webinars that your colleagues can watch to help them better understand pensions. Hosted by our pension experts, Clare Moffat, and Sarah Pennells, they cover a range of topics including the State Pension, pensions and tax relief and pension transfers.
- Pelican Post – our monthly newsletter gives your colleagues access to a wealth of useful materials and articles to help them take steps towards building their financial resilience.
What can you do?
You have access to our employer communication toolkit to help you support and engage with your colleagues about their pension. Topics include our mobile app, financial wellbeing service and much more.
You can also sign up for Pension Matters, our monthly employer newsletter which provides you with updates, resources and support to help manage your company's pension scheme and support your colleagues.