While everyone hopes to enjoy a comfortable retirement, many find saving enough for the future a challenge. A 2025 report by non-profit Transamerica Institute, for example, found that almost seven in 10 workers in the United States believe they could work until retirement and still not have saved enough to meet their needs in old age. The fact that many people are living for longer in retirement only makes this more challenging.
“Today’s workers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They are traversing disruptions in the economy, a tenuous employment market, and the high cost of everyday living – while being expected to self-fund a greater portion of their retirement income compared with prior generations,” said Catherine Collinson, CEO and president of Transamerica Institute.
However, solutions are available to support people in saving more. Workplace retirement plans, for example, automatically set aside money each month from employees’ paychecks to help them build up extra retirement savings. The potential societal benefits of these plans have caught the attention of policymakers.
Expanding access to retirement plans
For instance, in the United States, Congress passed the SECURE 2.0 Act in 2022, which aims to broaden access to workplace retirement plans in various ways. These include requiring employers over a certain size to automatically enroll employees when they set up a new workplace retirement plan.
Aegon’s business in the United States, Transamerica, is dedicated to supporting employers of all sizes in providing workplace retirement plans to their employees.
“We want to support Americans in saving for the future, regardless of the size of the company they work for. While we provide solutions to many large and medium-sized companies, a lot of the activity we are seeing relates to smaller employers who typically do not yet have workplace retirement plans in place,” said Darren Zino, Head of Retirement Distribution at Transamerica.
“This can be for various reasons, but often smaller companies lack the resources to manage the administrative or fiduciary responsibilities that come with providing a retirement plan. This is where we can help through solutions such as our pooled plans, which allow small employers to share those burdens.”
Every business is unique, so Transamerica works with local intermediaries who understand the needs of small businesses in their area. Many small employers are unaware of the various options and potential benefits available to them, such as certain tax benefits, so building relationships and starting conversations is an important first step.
“The intermediaries we work with understand their clients' needs and can align them with our solutions. And these solutions can make a big difference. In 2024, we surveyed 400 employers, and nearly half said that using our pooled plans had allowed them to offer a workplace retirement plan for the first time,” Zino added.
Making sense of pension pots
Moving across the Atlantic Ocean, in the United Kingdom many people face similar challenges in saving for retirement. UK government statistics show that over a million retired households rely solely on the state pension, and various surveys have highlighted that many people in the United Kingdom are not saving enough for retirement.
To help tackle this issue, in 2012, the UK government implemented auto enrolment, whereby employees are automatically enrolled into their workplace pension schemes, unless they opt out. In the first 10 years, auto enrolment added an additional 10m workplace pension savers in the United Kingdom, bringing the total number to over 20m. However, many people now have multiple jobs during their working life and, when they change jobs, they often begin saving in a new workplace pension scheme. This can make it challenging to keep track of all their schemes throughout their career.
To address this, Aegon UK offers a service to members of its Workplace platform to help them find and compare features of their various old pension schemes. Members can use this information to decide whether they want to transfer a pension pot to Aegon UK, making their retirement savings easier to manage.
Nick Roy, Director, Client & Partnership Development at Aegon, said: “This is a great development which gives our Workplace members the opportunity to find and add old pension pots, where it is safe and makes sense to do so.”
Ready for the future
As people around the world prepare to live longer in retirement, it will only become more important for them to have access to solutions, like workplace retirement plans, that enable them to save more for longer and to keep track of various plans across their careers.