A gaming vision for enticing young to financial planning
Financial planning in a gaming format could attract the young to the profession by making processes more friendly and engaging, says Justin Urquhart Stewart ACSI
Putting financial planning into a gaming format could be an effective way of enticing disinterested younger people to consider their pensions.
That was the suggestion from Paraplanner Conference keynote Speaker Justin Urquhart Stewart ACSI, Co-Founder and Head of Corporate Development at Seven Investment Management (7IM). He told delegates that talking to undergraduates at university about their retirement income was a waste of time. They "simply do not care or wish to engage about the topic," he said.
His firm has developed a new future planning digital tool, which takes inspiration from gaming. He said this has "shown great promise in attracting the attention of younger savers". He said it was important to get financial planning into the general consciousness of the country and try to get people to understand that they need planners. At the moment, people come across planners too late and need to be aware of them at a much earlier stage in life, he said. He challenged delegates: “How do we communicate this to people?”
He said: “If you go to undergraduates to do a talk on pensions, they are not interested. But do this in a game form – press a button, show them how the future looks – now they are interested because there is something tangible in what is going on.
“It’s about turning it into something which makes it more engaging; we can’t make it entertaining, that’s probably flippant, but the attention span of the next generation is not going to be there. If it’s not there in a nano second, it’s gone. As an industry we have to learn how to change and we can.”
It’s about making the process more user friendly, he said, adding this is what the app developed by 7IM tries to achieve. Mr Urquhart Stewart also gave an overview of world markets and geopolitics.
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