feeding back comments in our savings survey

In October we sent a survey to Customer Panel members asking them to tell us about their attitudes to savings, and what encouragements or obstacles they’ve experienced in forming good savings habits.

Thank you to the hundreds of Panel members who took the time to complete it. The results provide us with useful insights for developing our simple and easy product range, marketing information and correspondence to customers.

Your views have encouraged us to keep this under review.

Findings include:

• 8 out of 10 parents talk about saving with their children
• 90% of parents believe it quite or very important that siblings have equal savings
• over 1/3rd of respondents save for grandchildren up to age 18

• top priorities for savings are:

  1. Retirement
  2. Overall financial security
  3. Savings for emergencies
  
  

savings tips provided by customer panel members

• save little and often

• start saving and forget about it for a few years

• budget for saving

helping with the design of our annual statements

We sought the views of Customer Panel members with unit-linked and deposit-based savings & investment products on a re-designed annual statement.

Around 90% of respondents thought it was clearer and provided the information they would want.

These newly designed statements were rolled out to customers in January 2008 and the design template was carried forward for our With Profits customers in April 2008.