How a collaborative pensions event fostered creative ideas for our future
The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has launched an Innovation Support Service to create an environment that helps industry build solutions with savers at their heart. The regulator’s Head of Innovation and Design Practice, Marion Lean explains how TPR has already begun this process with the service’s first event – an innovation hackathon.
Regulation and innovation. There is a perception these are two words that do not go well together.
The idea that regulation and regulators can support innovation rather than stymie it was brought into sharp focus for what was a new kind of industry event for TPR – a policy hackathon.
We recently launched an Innovation Support Service to support new ideas and products that benefit savers and can potentially provide fuel to fire up the UK’s economic growth. The service has already started delivering.
We wanted the service’s first event to be collaborative, stimulating and provide answers to some of the biggest challenges in pensions, so we designed a hackathon – a format well known in the tech world, but now also increasingly used by other industries.
The idea is to engage in rapid and collaborative idea creation in a tight timescale to develop solutions to problems.
On 4 June 2025, we brought together pensions professionals, service designers, and fintech founders to develop answers to a broad range of issues. They included decumulation, financial literacy, supporting self-employed people, improving administration and member experience, and promoting environmental, social and governance principles.
While we were aiming to encourage the creation of novel solutions, we also wanted the event to be an opportunity to network and to enhance people’s innovation and collaboration skills. The experience gained on the day was as significant as the solutions participants developed together.
High energy
The day was very energetic.
We began with idea generation and prototyping; hackathon participants were encouraged to form their own teams. Each team then developed potential solutions to a set challenge, using prototyping methods to do so.
The teams worked to refine ideas, test concepts and give feedback to each other. By the end of the day, they were ready to demonstrate their new pension innovations to an audience of pensions experts for some probing questions.
As audience questions emerged, it became increasingly clear that, rather than being a barrier to innovation, regulation could be vital to facilitating it.
Be it action from regulators to ensure industry has quality data to enable savers to make decisions, to considering tax treatment or guardrails for artificial intelligence to ensure saver trust – the need for regulation came up time and again.
This event proved how timely the launch of our innovation support service is. With a mix of discussion sessions, thought leadership and cross-government working, we believe we can provide an environment which helps industry build solutions with savers at their heart.
You can see videos of those who attended on YouTube or find out about future innovation events, read the latest news from our innovation service and find out how to discuss or test an innovation with us via our Innovation Support Service’s homepage.
The innovative concepts the teams designed
- Flexi fund for the self-employed: A tax-efficient savings pot that allows self-employed workers to automatically set aside income for long-term savings.
- Bloom – personalised financial goal app: An interactive app for people in their thirties, enhancing financial literacy through quizzes, videos, and advice. Users earn reward points redeemable for perks.
- Community-designed investment: A democratic investment approach where a diverse group of savers forms an assembly, voting on key investment decisions, such as environmental policies.
- Butler – AI financial advisor: A digital financial assistant integrating banking and pensions data to provide tailored retirement insights and spending guidance.
- Joint pension visibility: A button enabling family members to share pension information, fostering better financial planning and transparency, with potential benefits for reducing the gender pension gap.
- A good life: Expert-led, early financial coaching encouraging early money conversations, including a reverse deposit scheme allowing first-time buyers to use pension funds for home deposits.
Head of Innovation and Design Practice
