PensionBee and Plaid working together to make Open Finance a reality

Open banking has helped make much of consumer finance simpler, turning a paper-intensive, slow industry into an instantaneous digital one. However, pensions are one corner of financial services that’s still much more complicated than they need to be. They’re 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 one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives - how they plan for retirement. With 9.6m 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 working to change all of that: the online-only pension provider allows people to combine all of their existing pensions into one intuitive, easy-to-use 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 smooth “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.

Together, PensionBee and Plaid are taking the next step in the journey to expand open banking into open finance and help people gain access to and control over all aspects of their financial lives —beyond just their current accounts. 

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.

Want to see Plaid’s Payment Initiation in action? Head over to Pensionbee’s app and choose “easy bank transfer”. If you’re looking to build new ways to make moving money easier with Plaid’s open finance tools, please reach out!