The Centre for Inclusive Money at Nest - previously Nest Insight - has partnered with Monzo, one of the UK’s leading digital banks with more than 15 million customers, to tackle low levels of retirement savings seen amongst self-employed people. The organisations will work together to explore the ways that banks can support self-employed people to save for later life, bringing together seven years of Inclusive Money research and Monzo’s experience supporting hundreds of thousands of sole traders through Monzo Business. Just 17% of the UK’s 4.4 million self-employed people are saving into a pension, compared to almost 90% of eligible employees. This is despite three-quarters of self-employed workers saying it’s important to put money aside for retirement (in line with the proportion of employed people who say this). While employees are automatically enrolled into a pension, there’s no similar mechanism for the self-employed. This, coupled with an often variable or uncertain income, makes saving for retirement more complex for self-employed people. The second UK Pensions Commission’s interim report highlights that ‘self-employed participation in pensions saving represents one of the most urgent challenges for the UK pensions system.Monzo has seen first-hand how simple product design and automation can help customers build positive financial habits. Earlier this year, more than 2 million customers signed up for Monzo's automated Savings Challenge after customers collectively set aside more than £360 million through the challenge in 2025. Meanwhile, Monzo Business customers last year set aside a total £450 million through automated Tax Pots to cover future tax bills. This project will explore whether similar behavioural design principles can help make retirement saving easier for self-employed people. The partnership with Monzo is the latest milestone in Inclusive Money’s multi-year programme which aims to better understand the low levels of saving seen among self-employed people and test a range of approaches to encourage and enable retirement saving in a way that meets their needs. The project’s most recent research offers some of the first evidence that ‘default savings’ models hold real promise in solving the problem, while still preserving the choice and flexibility for those who do not want to, or cannot, save.The partnership will now take those findings into a real-world environment through a customer initiative with Monzo Business. Insights from this work will help inform future product thinking and will also be shared with the UK Government's Pensions Commission, to support its review into retirement outcomes due in 2027. Ruth Persian, Associate Director of Research and Innovation at the Centre for Inclusive Money at Nest, commented: ‘Monzo’s approach to product design will help us take our research forward to the next step: moving from promising ideas to real-world solutions for real customers. We look forward to bringing together our combined expertise and finding solutions that work and support self-employed people to become more financially secure.’ Jordan Shwide, General Manager at Monzo Business, added: ‘Millions of self-employed people are missing out on the benefits of automatic retirement saving, despite many wanting to put money aside for the future. We're excited to work with Inclusive Money to explore easy ways to help sole traders start building retirement savings and to contribute evidence that could help shape future policy. We want to help people build financial security and resilience, in line with our mission to make money work for everyone.’ NoYesPersonal Finance23 Jul, 2026