Tech Corner: Only 11%. What Technology Can Do About the Pensions Gap on Divorce

Only 11% of divorcees with a pension not yet in payment made any arrangement to share it, according to the Fair Shares study led by Professor Emma Hitchings.[[1]] The same research found that over a third of divorcees did not know the value of their own pension, and nearly a quarter did not know whether they were in a defined benefit or defined contribution scheme.[[2]]

Then consider the second edition of the Pension Advisory Group’s Guide (PAG2), which states, ‘Ignoring the pensions or agreeing to ignore the pensions is not an option’.[[3]]

There is a consensus (but you already know this) that pensions must be dealt with properly, and divorcees overwhelmingly don’t. That gap does not reflect a shortage of professional talent. The evidence points to cost, to time and to slow processes that still largely run on paper. Technology can address all three, which is why we are building a solution.

Why the gap exists

PAG2 is clear about the problem. It notes that persuading parties to pay for a pension on divorce expert (PODE) report ‘can be challenging, especially where costs are escalating’, while warning that the cost of guessing ‘can be immense for either party’.[[4]] It also records that negligence claims against family lawyers involving pensions ‘overwhelmingly relate to ill-considered offsetting agreements’.[[5]]

The trouble is that the median total asset pool in Fair Shares, including the matrimonial home, pensions and net of debts, was £135,000.[[6]] A PODE report fee of £2,000 plus VAT, which is not at the top of the range, is a material sum against a pool of that size, and it commonly falls due when finances are already stretched. Avoiding a further fee is easy to understand, but it is likely to prove more costly in the long run (for at least one of the married couples).

Add to that the fact that fewer than 40% of those divorcing in England and Wales each year use the legal system (even by consent) to reach a financial arrangement at all.[[7]] Of the 102,678 divorces granted in 2023,[[8]] most were settled by people who had no professional to tell them what their pension was worth, or why that mattered. The 60% of people who divorced without a financial order cannot, as it is not possible without one, have shared their pensions.

This is the advice gap, wearing different clothes

Octopus Money’s goal is to address the advice gap, and the pattern here is familiar. The FCA’s ‘Financial Lives 2024’ survey found that 8.6% of UK adults, some 4.6m people, had received regulated financial advice on investments, pensions or retirement planning in the previous 12 months, while 29%, around 15.8m, had not received advice but may have had a need for support.[[9]] Our own research among 203 advisers, with fieldwork in July 2024, found that the average minimum asset threshold for taking on a client had risen 12% in a year to £214,000, with 45% of firms having already shifted focus to higher-asset clients.[[10]]

We believe that providing better access to financial advice and guidance leads to better client outcomes, and this is no different. We want to increase access to support on pensions on divorce, which will lead to better long-term outcomes for the individuals involved.

This is not a criticism of the businesses already in this market. They are not responsible for the gap between those who access their service and those who do not, just as it is not for existing financial advice businesses to solve the advice gap on their own. If your business is performing well, by helping your clients in the way you intended, then congratulations, it is (and you are) doing well. Change often comes from outside.

What we are trying to achieve

Our team produces PODE reports for a fixed fee, intentionally priced at the lower end of the market, with the aim of reducing price as a barrier. Working for a lower flat fee requires the mechanical parts of report production to be as smooth as possible. We have automated wherever we can, so that the team can concentrate on the points where human judgement and interaction matters most.

The journey starts with an online eligibility check and instant quote, a digital letter of instruction, and a shared dashboard that both parties and their solicitors can see. The result is a report at a fixed fee of £1,200 including VAT for defined contributions pensions, rising to £1,800 where defined benefit schemes are included. The purpose of the automation is to reach a price at which a couple with a £135,000 pool can say ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’.

Next, the client submission, letter of instruction and scheme documentation are reviewed and assessed for completeness. Our system automatically checks the information provided against our checklist. Where information is missing, letters of authority are produced alongside an email to keep clients informed. Before anything is sent to clients, the output is reviewed by the team. This step alone has materially reduced the time spent on cases. Any additional information received is reviewed in the same way, and once the case is complete it is reviewed again by a member of the team before it moves to the next stage. This is not revolutionary, but streamlining allows us to deliver the service for less and to more people.

Once deemed ready, we feed the data into our bespoke system. Avoiding manual entry saves time and reduces input errors. The tool embeds public sector pension factors for the schemes we cover. Where a scheme has not yet issued a cash equivalent transfer value (CETV) figure, the tool derives an indicative cash equivalent so that a case can be scoped and progresses immediately. Every such figure is labelled as indicative on screen and in the report, with an instruction to obtain the confirmed value from the administrator before any final order. The technology accelerates the conversation. It does not replace the scheme.

The pension expert then runs the equalisation calculations. Equalisation of income at a chosen target date, capital equalisation and offsetting scenarios all sit in one place. Scheme factors are used so that the sharing calculation aligns with the scheme’s own approach.

Once the pension expert is happy with the calculations, the tool produces a client-facing report; we have kept this as simple as possible so clients can easily understand it. It turns out that not everyone enjoys or understands pension industry terminology. Additionally, every input, factor and intermediate figure is exportable as an audit report.

We haven’t automated personal responsibility; every report is signed off by qualified humans. The technology does the arithmetic and the typing.

The industry has to move

Technology alone won’t fix this problem, but it is the best lever we have to address what is within our control.

Pension schemes must get better. A great deal of time is wasted on requesting information from schemes that should either be included when a client requests a CETV or be publicly available. Improving this would save time (and money) on report production, allow clients to receive the support they need sooner, and reduce demands on the schemes themselves. In general, the public sector schemes are pretty good, time delays apart. If the schemes provided accurate data the first time, we could produce reports in a matter of days, more likely hours, and time saved on unnecessary admin would mean lower costs – helping to reduce that barrier and open up the service to more people.

Nor will dashboards rescue this. At the time of writing, the connection deadline for in-scope schemes is 31 October 2026, but the Money and Pensions Service expects the first public dashboard during the 2027 to 2028 financial year.[[11]] Nothing in that timetable helps anyone divorcing now.

What’s next?

With the Ministry of Justice’s ‘A Fairer End to Relationships’ consultation, which closed on 14 August 2026, considering extending financial claims to qualifying cohabitants, this puts pension needs into the needs hierarchy for both divorcing couples and separating cohabitants.[[12]] That is a large increase in the number of people with a pension question and no obvious route to an answer. Demand is only going to grow!

The 11% level is not a technology problem on its own. But every pound and every week we can take out of getting a pension properly valued moves the number in the right direction.

[[1]]: Hitchings, E, Bryson, C, Sefton, M and Barlow, A, Fair Shares? Sorting out money and property on divorce, University of Bristol and Nuffield Foundation, November 2023 (Fair Shares), www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/law/news/2023/Fair%20Shares%20report%20-%20final.pdf

[[2]]: Fair Shares.

[[3]]: Pension Advisory Group, A Guide to the Treatment of Pensions on Divorce (2nd edn, 2024), key messages (Pension Advisory Group), www.nuffieldfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/A-guide-to-the-treatment-of-pensions-on-divorce-2nd-edition.pdf

[[4]]: Pension Advisory Group, para 1.7.

[[5]]: Pension Advisory Group, key messages, Part 7.

[[6]]: Fair Shares.

[[7]]: Fair Shares.

[[8]]: Office for National Statistics, ‘Divorces and dissolutions in England and Wales: 2023,’ 2 July 2025, www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2023

[[9]]: Financial Conduct Authority, ‘Financial Lives 2024 survey: Financial advice & support’, May 2025, www.fca.org.uk/publication/financial-lives/fls-2024-financial-advice-support.pdf

[[10]]: Octopus Money/Censuswide survey of 203 UK financial advisers, fieldwork 4 to 11 July 2024, published 31 July 2024, octopusmoney.com/consumer-duty-research

[[11]]: Pensions Dashboards Programme, connection deadline, www.pensionsdashboardsprogramme.org.uk/connection/deadline; on the expected public launch in the 2027/28 financial year see Professional Pensions, ‘MoneyHelper dashboard expected to launch in 2027/28’, 20 May 2026, www.professionalpensions.com/news/4529973/pp-live-26-moneyhelper-dashboard-expected-launch-2027

[[12]]: Ministry of Justice, ‘A Fairer End to Relationships’, consultation opened 5 June 2026 and closed 14 August 2026, www.gov.uk/government/consultations/a-fairer-end-to-relationships; see also Graeme Fraser, ‘Summary of Government’s Consultation on Fairer End to Relationships’, Financial Remedies Journal, 5 June 2026, financialremediesjournal.com/summary-of-governments-consultation-on-fairer-end-to-relationships/