One of the perennial big policy questions in social welfare – so no surprise that it has surfaced in the context of the business strategy – is how to encourage levels of saving during working life which will support the post-retirement lifestyle people aspire to.  The utility of spending money today tends to trump the discounted utility of spending the proceeds of investing that money in several decades’ time.

The UK response has been essentially exhortatory with a slight skew to encouraging terror, but there is little sign that an approach based on fear has the right motivational consequences.  So a question which will become increasingly important is, how do we find ways of providing positive motivation to take long-term savings seriously?

‘Making it fun’ would be a tremendous answer – but fairly self-evidently is not the easiest thing to achieve.  So NetWorth IQ is really interesting:  an attempt to bring some of the network support effects which come from social network developments over the last few years with personal financial management tools developed in a completely different part of the web ecology.  As they put it:

NetworthIQâ„¢ is a social personal finance manager designed to make monitoring
your net worth easy and, dare we say it, maybe even fun. Heck, it’s even FREE!

Is this the new market DWP should be breaking in to?