Putting Financial Planning into a gaming format could be an effective way of enticing disinterested younger people to consider their pensions, Paraplanners were told this morning.

Justin Urquhart Stewart ACSI, Co-Founder and Head of Corporate Development, Seven Investment Management, told the CISI Paraplanner Conference that talking to undergraduates at university about their retirement income was a waste of time.

They simply don’t care or engage in a traditional conversation about the topic, he said.

But his firm has developed a new future planning digital tool, which takes inspiration from gaming. He said this has shown great promise in attracting the attention of younger savers.

He said it was important to get Financial Planning into the general consciousness of the country and try to get people to understand that they need planners.

At the moment people come across planners too late and need to be aware of them at a much earlier stage in life, he said.

But he asked delegates: “How do we communicate this to people?”

He said: “If you go to undergraduates to do a talk on pensions, they are not interested.

“But do this in a game form, press a button, show them how the future looks, now they are interested because there’s something tangible in what’s going on.

“It’s about turning it into something which makes it more engaging, we can’t make it entertaining, that’s probably flippant, but the attention span of the next generation is not going to be there. If it’s not there in a nano second, it's gone.

“As an industry we have to learn how to change and we can.”

It’s about making the process more user friendly, he said, adding this is what the app developed by 7IM tries to achieve.

He said: “I think this is one of the best selling tools I have come across for the Financial Planning area.”

Mr Urquhart Stewart gave an overview of world markets and geopolitics, looking at the investment environment.

He looked at some of the complexities across asset classes, market movements, inflation, interest rate changes as well as financial and non-financial risk at the macro level.