When Bell Canada was communicating defined contribution plan changes to members in 2024, it turned to artificial intelligence to help personalize its message to all of its 25,000 plan members.
The redesign, which aimed to respond to members’ different financial priorities, enhanced the company’s savings options with a first home savings account, a tax-free savings account and a registered retirement savings plan in addition to the DC plan. When members opt to save in one of the registered accounts, Bell continues to contribute the employer match to the DC plan.
Previously, the company had used AI to create a wide range of personas for pensions-related information videos. Depending on a plan member’s demographic group and stage of life, they’d see a certain person with a certain voice narrating the video.
Read: 2025 DC Plan Summit: How Bell Canada incorporated plan sponsor guidance into DC plan design
For its pension redesign campaign, Bell employed the same approach, creating personas of plan members at various ages and life stages — such as someone in their 20s looking to buy a car, in their 30s with a young family and looking to buy a house or in their 40s contributing a fair bit to their pension already and wanting guidance on what to do next. From there, plan members received a more personalized description of the plan changes.
“It’s not an easy message to communicate,” says Robert Marchessault, director of pension and benefits. But as a result of the campaign, 10 per cent of plan members changed their savings option.
From AI-enabled communications to targeted nudges, personalized financial planning tools to consumer-grade mobile app experiences, plan sponsors, record keepers and consultants are using technology to further personalize the retirement savings experience for capital accumulation plan members. The next generation of personalization is an evolution from broader persona-based messaging, with an aim to send plan members the right message at the right time.
“Once you can give that level of granularity and show you’re speaking to them and not everyone else, you’re more likely to drive a change,” says David Morton, senior director and Canadian DC leader at WTW. “That’s what academics have found captures people’s attentions and is more likely to drive them to make a change, which is the fundamental challenge with these sorts of pension plans.”
Personal portals
Manulife has a five-piece member personalization strategy, says Marc-Antoine Morin, the company’s assistant vice-president of product development for group retirement solutions.
“We’re targeting the right member with the right message with the right creative in the right channel at the right time. It’s a lot, but that’s where we’re at in terms of sophistication.”
From the member perspective, that involves creating different audiences based on commonalities, such as younger versus older members, people who haven’t made an investment selection or employees who aren’t maximizing their contributions. The record keeper is talking to employers about the idea of changing the message it sends depending on the audience, such as going beyond traditional demographic data to have different messages for digital and non-digital users.
In addition to sharing a variety of messages, these communications have different visual presentations, right down to image selection, says Morin, noting Manulife has also started experimenting with AI videos. “You can do plan-level personalization. It takes minutes to do it and I have eight sets of videos I can distribute. If there’s a plan design change, it’s very easy to tweak it.”
Reaching members through the right channel is relatively new. In recent years, communications have evolved from letters to emails to push notifications through a desktop or mobile app, but record keepers are now thinking of the broader member experience. When Manulife plan members log into their portal, they’re greeted by a personalized banner. The record keeper’s most successful campaign so far involved messages asking members if they wanted to review or update their beneficiary by pointing out how many years it had been since they’d made the designation.
The Co-operative Superannuation Society Pension Plan is moving in the direction of a customized plan member portal, according to Tami Dove, the plan’s director of member experience. The Saskatchewan-based multi-employer pension plan has about 300 participating employers and more than 56,000 members.
The CSS is currently rebuilding its portal so that next year, when a member logs in, the portal will be able to leverage data about them — such as their age, marital status, career stage and contribution level — to send them nudges or relevant educational articles, she says.
Read: CSS pension plan recognized for digital-first communications strategy
Sun Life has two approaches to personalization, says Dave Jones, the record keeper’s senior vice-president of group retirement services. Its AI-powered virtual assistant Ella can send plan members a nudge for a range of actions that would be valuable to them, including encouraging them to make a final RRSP contribution, reminding them to make their investment selection or alerting them to the fact they aren’t taking full advantage of an employer match. Sun Life also provides members with an AI-powered financial planning tool For anything related to personalization, “the starting point is digital,” says Jones. The record keeper’s numbers bear it out: digitally engaged Sun Life retirement savings plan members had an average balance 230 per cent higher and contributed at a rate that’s 61 per cent above people who aren’t digitally engaged.
Early days
Personalization in the DC space is still in its nascency, says Jacquie Fabro, director of communications consulting at Eckler Ltd., because — for many plan sponsors — it’s too costly to build and maintain their own technology and tools.
“There’s not a lack of interest. People generally understand that the world is communicating a certain way outside of work. Organizations are getting that and want to figure out how to do it, but from what I’ve seen, it’s cost-prohibitive.”
The consultancy has worked with plan sponsors to build AI-powered chatbots embedded into their websites that are personalized to answer plan members’ pension-related questions. Those are on par with the affordability of creating AI videos, says Fabro, but maintaining the technology is more costly: someone on staff needs to dedicate time to training and retraining the language model behind the chatbot.
Read: Effective AI integration requires customization effort from pension plan sponsors: report
Plan sponsors that build their own tools have compared them to other consumer-grade experiences that plan members are used to, she says. “If it’s not as good as what’s outside [of the workplace], people will revert [to not using it]. That’s where there’s a bit of a hold up.”
Record keepers, on the other hand, have the resources and scale to invest in developing these products. “It’s enabling plan sponsors to provide personalization but not have all the costs,” says Fabro.
However, the downside, she notes, is these tools are likely not branded to the plan sponsor and might not “speak their language or use their visuals.”
It’s something that’s underway at the CSS. “One of the personalizations we’re working towards [is], . . . in our portals, members will see us, the CSS pension, as well as their employer’s logo and a message from their employer,” says Dove. “This really tight connection between the employer and the pension plan is important for the experience of the employer. They’re doing this for attraction and retention reasons.”
Eckler also has its own tool for plan sponsors to leverage, which allows users to plan for their particular financial goals, not just retirement, says Fabro, noting that, once the plan member puts in some of their own financial details, it can give them a general financial outlook, point out where they’re spending money and where they could cut back to reach their goal and help them plan for retirement.
A pricey proposition
Personalization doesn’t have to be pricey, says Morton.
Generally speaking, plan members who aren’t on track to retire at an optimal age fall into one of three categories: they aren’t maximizing their employer match; they’re investing too conservatively; or their income is high enough that government benefits will make up a smaller share of their retirement income so they need to be saving at higher rates.
Rather than “identifying 12 to 16 profiles of employees and trying to develop custom messages for each,” Morton suggests plan sponsors use plan data to identify at risk employee groups and focus on them. “For most employers, what we find is 50 to 75 per cent of employees are doing OK and for now you can ignore them . . . and focus the resources you have on the others,” though he says it’s important to remeasure to make sure all employees stay on track.
Key takeaways
• Personalization tools are nudging CAP members to make positive decisions such as taking full advantage of their employer match or changing their investment selections.
• The costs associated with building, buying and maintaining these tools are still prohibitive for many plan sponsors.
• Personalization does come with some governance concerns for plan sponsors that may be worried about having less oversight of what’s sent to their employees by their record keeper.
WTW has a tool that analyzes record-keeper data on plan members’ retirement balances, contribution levels, employer matches and investment selections to understand individual member outcomes. The tool projects a member’s account balances year by year and also uses demographic population data, as well as Statistics Canada and U.S. Bureau of Labour data, to get a sense of how much an individual member is likely to have in government benefits based on their age, income level and industry. From there, it calculates the age at which the member can likely afford to retire. For those whose projected retirement age is “unfavourable,” the company homes in on why. “Once you’ve done that analysis, you can segment plan membership by people who have similar issues,” says Morton.
The consultancy also conducts AI-enabled virtual focus groups for plan sponsors. Using a desktop portal that looks like a text exchange, plan members respond to questions from a WTW facilitator about their plan. AI analyzes all of the responses and then identifies the common issues. The missives sent to at risk plan members tend to hit their marks, she says.
Governance concerns
While many pension plan sponsors are keen on personalization, Morin says some do raise concerns about their own ability to oversee what’s being sent to their members.
“If you want to leverage personalization, you have to do a tradeoff between control and effectiveness. Personalization is effective, but most organizations don’t want to hire four more people to oversee the personalized engine. You have to rely a bit more on a service provider and let go, instead of reviewing each piece.”
Read: 2025 DC Plan Summit: How the engagement revolution can boost retirement outcomes
In the past five years, Manulife developed an “always on engagement program” so plan members can get the true benefit of personalization, rather than the record keeper individually deploying it on a per plan sponsor basis. However, plan sponsors have the ability to opt out entirely or to select various components of the program they’re interested in having shown to their members.
Looking to the future, Morin thinks personalization in the CAP space will take a new form: flexible plan design that gives members the choice of multiple savings vehicles to recognize their various life stages and needs, with the employer match going into a longer-term vehicle such as a DC pension or deferred profit-sharing plan.
At Bell, which is already on this path, Marchessault says it’s clear there’s interest. “We’re seeing that more youngsters don’t want to contribute into the DC plan — and for them, we have different options. That’s what we say: ‘It’s good that you’re saving for a house, a car, to pay back student loans. It’s as good as contributing to a DC plan.’”
Kelsey Rolfe is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
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