The Blackrock Foundation has committed £1.5m to Nest Insight, the public benefit research and innovation centre on household financial security. Since 2018, Nest Insight has been working with employers and delivery partners to find the most effective ways to support more people to save. This three year-partnership renewal will see Nest Insight build on this ground-breaking work as part of BlackRock’s Emergency Savings Initiative, with the goal of millions more households building savings and progressing towards greater financial security.
The commitment was announced by Gavin Lewis, Managing Director, on 31 March at Nest Insight’s event, Boosting UK Savings Inclusion. The event marked the launch of new research from Nest Insight, which demonstrates that an opt-out approach to saving could make a significant impact on the UK’s savings gaps. Other speakers included the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Emma Reynolds MP, Baroness Drake CBE, Oliver Morley CBE of MaPS, Femi Adigun of Diversity in Pensions and Standard Life, Mike Brewer of the Resolution Foundation and Sarah Mckenzie of the Financial Conduct Authority.
The announcement shows a renewed commitment to further strengthen the long-standing collaboration between The BlackRock Foundation and Nest Insight, who have been in partnership since 2019. BlackRock launched its Emergency Savings Initiative (ESI) in 2019 against the backdrop of increasing awareness of the financial precarity facing low- and middle-income households. BlackRock’s support for Nest Insight has enabled major programmes of trials and research with UK employers and providers, with over 150,000 employees offered workplace savings to date. Through these trials, Nest Insight has built the evidence base that opt-out payroll saving is a popular, powerful and proven way to boost financial wellbeing.
The event shared very positive results from real-world trials of autoenrollment (“opt-out”) payroll savings approaches and explored how millions more UK workers could be supported to save in this way. One in four UK adults have less than £100 in savings. Opt-out payroll saving means that employees automatically start saving into an easy access cash savings account via payroll, unless they choose not to. At Bupa, Co-op and SUEZ where this approach was piloted, the proportion of employees saving increased dramatically, with up to seven in 10 employees beginning to save. Employees saving in this way save persistently and build up savings which they actively use. Opt-out schemes also benefit employers, because staff with savings are more productive, are absent less and have fewer accidents at work.
During the event a clear next set of steps emerged, with a need to set out the next level of detail for how a national system of opt-out payroll savings could work in practice and the principles such a system would need to meet to be able to garner consensus support.
With this new support from The BlackRock Foundation, the next phase of this work will be focussed on bringing these solutions to scale to workers and households across the country: working with regulators and supporting employers to facilitate more opt-out savings schemes to be offered to employees; identifying and testing solutions that work for smaller, as well as larger, employers and that can operate outside of traditional workplaces; and building out the detail of how emergency savings approaches could be better embedded in public policy initiatives such as the financial inclusion strategy and the pensions auto-enrolment framework to scale their reach to the millions of people who currently lack financial resilience.
Will Sandbrook, managing director of Nest Insight, said,
‘This generous funding from The BlackRock Foundation allows Nest Insight to advance our research, policy development and market innovation work and reinforces our joint commitment to improving the financial resilience of low- to middle-income households.’
Gavin Lewis, Head of Institutional for UK and Ireland at BlackRock, said,
‘I am thrilled to announce this new commitment from The BlackRock Foundation to Nest Insight as part of BlackRock’s Emergency Savings Initiative. At BlackRock, our mission is to help more people achieve financial well-being, and having accessible, liquid savings is a vital step towards building long-term economic security. Nest Insight’s work has demonstrated the effectiveness of workplace savings solutions, yet these remain out of reach for many low- and middle-income workers in the UK. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Nest Insight over the next three years to ensure every worker and family in the country has access to high-quality emergency savings solutions that provide peace of mind and security, today and for the future.’
Ian Cornelius, Interim CEO at Nest, said,
‘Nest is grateful for the funding from The BlackRock Foundation for Nest Insight, the public benefit research and innovation centre established by Nest in 2016, It enables Nest Insight to continue its pioneering work on financial security for UK households. Nest’s purpose is financial peace of mind for all, and it remains a proud supporter and the home of Nest Insight. Since its launch, Nest Insight’s research has taken a holistic approach to understanding the real financial lives of households, delivering insights that drive meaningful change. This funding from The BlackRock Foundation will support Nest Insight to continue with their ground-breaking and innovative research with the ambition of improving financial security for households across the UK.’
ENDS
Notes to editors
Previously, BlackRock and its charitable foundation have supported major programmes of trials and research by Nest Insight:
- From 2017 to 2023, the Sidecar Savings programme trialled workplace emergency or ‘sidecar’ savings tools to support people in building up a savings buffer for emergencies alongside contributions into their pension. This work, also supported by the JPMorganChase and the Money and Pensions Service, is recognised internationally as the first study of its kind.
- Since 2021, Nest Insight has been piloting and evaluating opt-out payroll saving approaches in three real-world trials covering over 70,000 UK employees. The trials were designed to explore, from differing angles, whether opt-out payroll saving results in more levels of saving that are more in line with the proportion of employees who want and need to save, and whether it supports employees’ financial wellbeing and resilience.
About Nest Insight
Nest Insight is a public-benefit research and innovation centre. Our mission is to find ways to support people to be financially secure, both today and into retirement. We conduct rigorous, cutting-edge research, working collaboratively with industry and academic partners to understand the financial challenges facing low- and moderate-income households. We use these data-driven insights to identify and test practical, real-world solutions. Our findings are shared widely and freely so that people around the world can benefit from our work. For more information, visit nestinsight.org.uk
About our programme partner
BlackRock is a global investment manager serving the UK market for more than 30 years with a purpose to help more and more people experience financial wellbeing. BlackRock’s Emergency Savings Initiative is made possible through philanthropic support from The BlackRock Foundation. The initiative brings together partner companies and non-profit financial health experts to make saving easier and more accessible for low- to moderate-income people across the US and UK, ultimately helping more people to establish an important financial safety net. For more information, visit blackrock.com/corporate/about-us/social-impact
