The Centre for Inclusive Money at Nest has teamed up with Monzo to address the low levels of retirement savings among self-employed workers.

The organisations have collaborated to launch a project aimed at exploring how more self-employed people can build financial security for later life.

This will include investigating the ways banks can help self-employed workers to build up retirement savings, bringing together Centre for Inclusive Money’s research and Monzo’s experience with supporting sole traders.

It will also explore whether making pension saving simpler and more automatic can help self-employed people achieve long-term financial security.

Their findings will be shared with the Pensions Commission to support its review of retirement outcomes, which is due in 2027.

The Centre for Inclusive Money, previously Nest Insight, and Monzo highlighted that just 17 per cent of self-employed people were saving into a pension, according to the Pensions Commission.

The partnership is the latest development in the Centre for Inclusive Money’s multi-year programme to better understand low saving level among the self-employed and test a range of approaches to encourage and enable pension saving.

"Monzo’s approach to product design will help us take our research forward to the next step: moving from promising ideas to real-world solutions for real customers,” said Centre for Inclusive Money at Nest associate director of research and innovation, Ruth Persian.

"We look forward to bringing together our combined expertise and finding solutions that work and support self-employed people to become more financially secure."

Monzo Business general manager, Jordan Shwide, added: “Millions of self-employed people are missing out on the benefits of automatic retirement saving, despite many wanting to put money aside for the future.

“We're excited to work with Inclusive Money to explore easy ways to help sole traders start building retirement savings and to contribute evidence that could help shape future policy.

“We want to help people build financial security and resilience, in line with our mission to make money work for everyone.”

---