The Dutch pension sector has a communication problem and it is hiding in plain sight inside a document that looks entirely correct, according to WealthTech company Kidbrooke.
The transitieoverzicht, the statutory transition overview that insurers are required to send to participants ahead of and following the move to the new pension framework, satisfies its legal obligation. According to Kidbrooke, it is not, however, communicating.
The Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) has been making this point with increasing directness since late 2023. As recently as April 2025, it noted that personal explanations accompanying scenario amounts on transition overviews remain inadequate. The numbers are correct. The layout is compliant. But participants are walking away with the wrong impression.
Kidbrooke offered an example to illustrate the issue. A participant who spent 15 years in a middelloon scheme opens her overview and sees two columns: old arrangement versus new defined contribution (DC) scheme. The good-weather scenario shows a higher projected benefit under the new arrangement. She concludes the new scheme is better, files the document away, and stops thinking about her pension. Nobody explained that the optimistic scenario is not the expected outcome or that, at her age, the gap between good- and bad-weather scenarios is exceptionally wide.
That gap is precisely the issue Kidbrooke has been examining. The insurer segment faces this challenge most acutely. At the time of the Transitiemonitor Summer Report 2025, 93% of insurer contracts had yet to convert, covering some 57,000 contracts and around 1.5 million active participants. The overwhelming majority of those participants are encountering DC, with variable outcomes, investment choices, scenario-based projections for the very first time through the transitieoverzicht.
The AFM’s January 2025 first observations identified one of the core technical failings: providers are not using conditional text blocks. Every participant receives the same explanatory text, regardless of age, accrual history or scheme type. A 30-year-old and a participant five years from retirement receive identical language, even though their situations are entirely different. The regulator gave direct examples: explanations around eligibility for temporary old-age pension, compensation applicability, and partner pension are all highly personal and almost none of that nuance is reaching participants.
Kidbrooke argues this is fundamentally an infrastructure problem, not a content one. Writing clearer letter templates does not solve personalisation when the relevant variables differ for every single person in the book. The only operationally viable path at the scale of 1.5 million participants is to automate the analytics layer, integrating forecasting and scenario simulation that takes each participant’s actual data as input and produces genuinely personal outputs.
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