Many of us spend years diligently saving for our retirement so that we can enjoy it when the time comes. At PensionBee, we aim to make sure our products are designed in a way that helps our customers manage their pensions, no matter what stage of life they’re at. One of the ways we do this is by ensuring those customers who are at retirement age, currently, 55 (57 from 2028), can access their pension money in a way that’s convenient to them.
Earlier this year we were excited to bring the withdrawal feature to our mobile app. This was previously a feature only available through our website, but after listening to feedback from our customers, we knew it was important to make this available to customers on the mobile app too. So from early 2022, customers were able to access the same features, no matter how they chose to manage their pension.
Our existing withdrawal feature enables customers who are of retirement age to draw down money from their pension pot whenever they choose. Following the release of this feature, it’s now much easier for many of our customers to withdraw from their pension as they can now do it directly from their smartphone, rather than by logging into their account via our website. It’s a great start but we know we can continue to improve this process to make withdrawing even more convenient, simple and accessible for our customers.
At present, withdrawing money is a manual process for our customers, involving opening our mobile app or logging in via our website every time they’d like to withdraw from it. And whilst this manual process suits some of our customers, we’ve listened to the feedback from others who want us to find a way to automate this process and provide them with a simpler way to be in control of their pension pot and retirement. In response, we’re hard at work building our upcoming ‘regular withdrawal’ feature that’ll make it much easier for our customers to drawdown a regular income from their pension.
What is our regular withdrawal feature?
Our regular withdrawal feature is an extension of our existing withdrawal functionality, providing our customers with greater control over how, and when, they take their retirement income.
Choose a withdrawal date and amount
Customers will be able to schedule an amount of money to be withdrawn from their pension pot to their bank account by choosing from the payment date options that will be available. For example, you could choose to withdraw £500 from your pension pot on the 20th day of every month. The date you choose to receive your funds will be an estimated date in order to account for the impact of things such as weekends and bank holidays that could affect processing times but we’ll always do our best to make sure you’re paid on or as close as possible to your chosen payment date. You’ll only need to go through the set-up process once, unless you’d like to make a change, such as changing the date of your withdrawal or your bank details.
Regular withdrawals and lump sum withdrawals
Once available, customers will have access to two withdrawal methods. They will be able to choose to withdraw from their pension using either the new regular withdrawal option or the lump-sum option. However, it’ll only be possible to have one withdrawal method active at a time. For example, if you have a regular withdrawal active, but want to make a lump sum withdrawal, you would need to first cancel your regular withdrawal. Conversely, if you’ve set up a lump sum withdrawal but want to make regular withdrawals, you would need to wait for the lump-sum withdrawal to be cleared and paid before setting up your new regular withdrawal method.
After the regular withdrawals feature is launched we’ll continue to refine it further. One way we plan to do this is by enabling our customers to set up both withdrawal methods at the same time, if they would like to. But we’re excited that automating withdrawals this way will mean one less thing to think about for many of our customers.
When will the regular withdrawal feature be available?
We’re eager to get this feature into our customers’ hands as soon as we can, as we know so many are looking forward to it. We’re currently ironing out some of the processes so that making a regular withdrawal will be as smooth as possible. We’re hopeful that regular withdrawals will be available in the early summer, but watch this space for further updates on the release!
Since income drawdown was introduced by the government in 2015, it’s been possible for those who are of retirement age to decide how much of their pension money they would like to access, whilst keeping the rest of it invested so that it may continue to grow over the long-term. Through our new feature, we’re pleased to help our customers take advantage of the change in legislation to control their pension pot better and enjoy a happy retirement.
Our product teams are always hard at work building new features to help our customers feel more pension confident each day. We’d love to hear from you about any ways you think we can improve your PensionBee experience. If you have any feedback, suggestions or questions please get in touch, just drop us an email at [email protected].
Risk warning
As always with investments, your capital is at risk. The value of your investment can go down as well as up, and you may get back less than you invest. This information should not be regarded as financial advice.
