Can small digital design enhancements improve retirement outcomes?

Small digital design enhancements to the online enrollment experience can improve retirement outcomes — similar to dramatically raising the company’s match limit

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Summary

When it comes to an employee’s financial well-being in retirement, many of the most critical decisions are made during the initial enrollment process. To help nudge workers in a positive direction, the retirement industry has historically focused its attention on instituting automatic enrollment and providing generous match incentives. However, recent research from The Voya Behavioral Finance Institute for Innovation suggests another promising opportunity — one that could be even more attractive to an employer that is not in a position to increase the generosity of its match or change its plan design.

In a new working paper titled Save(d) by Design, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, City, University of London and UCLA conducted a field study¹ involving more than 8,500 employees across 500 workplace retirement plans. The workers, who were scheduled to be auto-enrolled into their employer-sponsored 401(k) plan, were visiting their online enrollment website to either confirm, decline or make personal adjustments to their savings selection. The study examined the impact of the following three design changes on the enrollment choices of employees.

Key insights

Making relatively small design changes to a retirement plan’s enrollment website can lead to greater personalized enrollment, match take up, average savings, and improved long-term financial security.²

1. Greater enrollment personalization: As a result of simple website design enhancements, the share of employees who personalized their enrollment increased by 15 percent. Among personalizers, the average contribution rate is 7.8 percent, compared to the rate of 3.4 percent among those who accept auto-enrollment.
2. Greater take-up of full company match: The design enhancements resulted in a 19 percent increase in the share of employees taking advantage of the company’s full match benefit. We also found that an optimized enrollment design can actually increase the effectiveness of existing matching incentives.
3. Greater plan savings and improved retirement security: The design changes also led to an increase in savings levels, boosting the average contribution rate by 62 basis points, or roughly 10 percent across all digital enrollees. That boost in savings is equivalent to what one would predict from increasing the typical employer match by 62 percent. Because of the “stickiness” of an employee’s initial contribution decisions, these increases in contributions due to design can lead to meaningful improvements to long-term retirement security.

Conclusion

If a company is looking to improve participant savings, and an individual’s long-term retirement security, as well as overall plan engagement, making small digital adjustments to an enrollment website can be a powerful strategy. By enhancing the online enrollment architecture in this manner, companies can generate improvements to retirement outcomes that are similar to the results of a dramatic match increase.

Voya Financial has applied these findings to its own enrollment process — in June of 2018 it began introducing newly designed screens to clients that are influenced by this research.

We encourage plan sponsors and advisors to explore the potential benefits that come with a deeper understanding of digital design.