Dutch pension insurers are producing transition overviews that tick every legal box and still leave participants fundamentally confused about what is happening to their retirement income, according to WealthTech company Kidbrooke.
The company recently delved into issues with transition communication.
The core problem is not inaccuracy, it said. The numbers are right, the formatting is compliant, and the documents go out on time. But compliance and communication are not the same thing, and the Autoriteit Financiële Markten (AFM) has been saying so with increasing directness since late 2023.
The scenario most participants face looks something like this: a woman who spent 15 years in a middelloon defined benefit scheme opens her transition overview and sees two columns: what she had under the old arrangement, what she will have under the new defined contribution (DC) scheme.
In the optimistic scenario, the new DC figure is higher. She concludes the new scheme is better, files the document away, and moves on. Nobody told her the optimistic scenario is not the expected outcome, or that for someone her age, the spread between best-case and worst-case projections is extremely wide.
The problem is sharpest for insurers. As of the Transitiemonitor Summer Report 2025, 93% of insurer contracts had not yet been converted, covering roughly 57,000 contracts and 1.5 million active participants. Most held guaranteed DB or middelloon arrangements, meaning their first real encounter with DC, variable outcomes, investment choices, scenario spreads, begins with the transition overview itself. The AFM’s Sector in Beeld 2025 report found that without context, widely divergent scenario figures are likely to generate exactly the unrealistic expectations the sector promised to prevent.
The AFM has been specific about what genuine personalisation requires. In its January 2025 observations, it found providers were applying identical explanatory text to all participants rather than using conditional text blocks relevant to each individual. A 30-year-old should not receive the same explanation as someone over 50. This is not a copywriting problem, it is a data and computation problem. Better templates cannot solve it, because the variables differ for every person in the book.
The transition overview and the keuzebegeleiding environment are two distinct instruments. The overview is a statutory, point-in-time disclosure. The choice environment is the interactive tool that helps participants understand what those changes mean and what they can do. Insurers treating the overview as the primary communication instrument and the choice environment as a compliance checkbox are asking one tool to do both jobs — and it cannot.
At the scale of 57,000 contracts and 1.5 million participants, genuine personalisation requires an automated analytics layer. KidbrookeOne offers forecasting and scenario simulation APIs that allow insurers to generate participant-specific was/wordt comparisons and build the interactive keuzebegeleiding environments the AFM requires, without rebuilding their entire technology stack.
For more insights, read the full story here.
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