The 21st century SIPP: Enabling financial institutions to meet the needs of the modern pension investor

The Self Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) is a child of the late 80’s- and like much of what that decade produced, they have found a second life in a rejuvenated form in the 2020’s. Estimates suggest that the SIPP market now represents over 20% of all funded pension assets, with the value of invested assets around £700bn across 6 million investors¹.

But the things that come back from the 80’s rarely return unchanged. Vinyl re-emerged for a generation that discovered the record through streaming. The Mini and the Fiat 500 returned with fully electric options. Even polaroids have become trendy for an era where digital selfies are the norm. What survives is the idea; rebuilt to be relevant for a new era.

The SIPP has followed the same path. The concept of a personal pension - where the individual directs investments themselves - has aged well. The proposition of today, however, looks very different from 30 years ago. No longer the preserve of the sophisticated, wealthy pension investor, SIPPs are increasingly popular amongst self-directed investors who are turning towards digital-first, easy-to-understand, flexible offerings. 

SIPPs are now commonly used by investors of any age to consolidate their past workplace pension pots accumulated across multiple pension providers (the typical British worker will change jobs 12 times during their career). This makes SIPPs a must-have proposition for fintechs, digital wealth managers, and traditional financial institutions alike. Offering the potential for longer tenured assets under management and an improved ability to serve the full financial life cycle of customers - particularly when paired with Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs), and General Investment Accounts (GIAs) - has become the standard.

Why now? The UK's pension moment

The UK is under-saving for retirement, and policymakers are clearly concerned³. A recent analysis conducted by Scottish Widows found that 31% of UK adults (approximately 12.2 million people) are at risk of not meeting their basic needs in retirement⁴.

The response from regulators has been a steady wave of activity designed to nudge people toward investing, and to make pensions easier to find, access, grow, and consolidate. 

Targeted Support sits at the heart of this. The FCA's new regulatory framework allows firms to offer consumers simplified, rules-based guidance without the liability and complexity of full regulated advice, opening the door to proactive, personalised nudges at scale. In practice, for Targeted Support to reach its full potential, pensions cannot sit apart from the broader investing experience. At their most powerful, pensions are easily integrated with an individual’s everyday finances and existing saving and investing habits, offering a consistent and holistic wealth experience. 

Additionally, the Pensions Dashboard public rollout - targeted for Autumn 2027 - will give consumers visibility of pensions they may have lost track of entirely, and create fresh momentum for consolidation. An estimated £31.1bn of pension assets in the UK are estimated to be either unclaimed, inactive or lost - averaging out at £9500 per pot across 3.3m pension accounts⁵. If that average was applied to an individual’s pension, it would add 50% to the average balance of a 25-34 year old⁶, at a time in their lives when they have decades ahead of them to build their wealth. Bringing even a fraction of this consolidation activity into a single, well-designed SIPP represents one of the largest addressable opportunities in UK retail investing today.

The self-directed opportunity

Pensions are benefiting from the growth in the rise of the mass-affluent consumer, and the broader adoption of self-directed investing. Digital-first providers are reaching a segment that the traditional wealth management industry has historically underserved, and SIPPs are increasingly central to meeting this segment’s needs.

Winning in the self-directed market means being designed for a digital, real-time experience from day one. It also means recognising that investors’ needs and risk appetites will shift across their lifespan. The same pension platform needs to be able to serve equally well a 21-year-old making her first contribution, a 55-year-old considering his retirement, and a 70-year-old drawing down.

The real challenge: offering a SIPP for the 21st century

Offering a SIPP is now seen as table stakes. The difficult part is launching a proposition that can absorb the pace of ever-evolving investor preferences and regulatory change, without falling behind.

Consider what a SIPP has had to accommodate since it was invented. The first ETF launched in 1993. The first gold ETC followed in 2003. The Long-Term Asset Fund arrived in 2023, and crypto ETNs listed in London in 2024. None of these developments existed when the wrapper was designed, and each one arrived on its own timetable, with their own consumer adoption curves and operational demands. A 1990s SIPP running on a platform built for once-a-day execution of mutual funds is not ready for the SIPP customer of today trading assets internationally, fractionally and in real-time across timezones. The 21st century SIPP requires infrastructure that is API-first, real-time, and designed for regulatory adaptability, where adding an asset class is routine and does not require a replatforming programme to be put in place. 

Change ready, by design

Building for change makes personalisation possible, and personalisation is what makes a pension feel worth caring about. When the experience is built around the individual - the assets they want, contributions that fit their schedule, goal setting, nudges, and analytics - a pension stops feeling distant and abstract ("not for me, not yet"). It becomes relevant and important now, whether the customer is 23 or 53. Creating a sense of agency and control is what gets individuals invested financially and emotionally, and keeps them engaged and active over the decades. The providers who put ease, transparency, and engagement at the heart of the experience will win the market and create millions more investors who believe that pensions are for them, now, whoever they are. 

To support a winning SIPP offering, we have built the Upvest pension infrastructure to cater directly for the needs of the modern investor, and an environment of inevitable and ongoing change - from asset classes to illustrations, withdrawal options to auto-investments. Upvest enables financial institutions and fintechs to design a relevant and engaging personal pension through the following key components:

Seamless onboarding & account opening 

• Fully digital user onboarding, with instant account activation and real-time user experience
• Simple user management of accumulation and decumulation pots, with the option to split investment strategies into multiple pots per user with clear role segregation via the Investment API

Intelligent order & contribution management 

• Flexibility across thousands of available securities including stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs, with the ability to invest fractionally starting from £1
• Automated, continuous tracking of contributions
• Recurring, fully programmable buy and sell orders through flexible portfolio management functionality
• Customisable, time-saving auto-investment of transfers and tax relief payments
• Employer contributions enabled to support the self-employed and small businesses that aren’t served by workplace pensions

Straight-through transfers & consolidation 

• Seamless, transparent, digital transfers and pension consolidation journeys to minimise uncertainty and customer contact
• Embedded pension-finding service to track down lost pensions
• Agentic ops MCP -  plug your agents directly into our transfers API to self-serve transfer updates

Automated documentation & reporting

• Automated end-user documentation across accumulation and decumulation phases 
• HMRC, Pension Dashboard and FCA reporting

Transparent, flexible decumulation 

• Flexible decumulation options, with straight-through processing for withdrawals
• Immediate access to tax-free cash for customers, with the option to reinvest in another wrapper through the same platform
• End-to-end payroll management

Empathetically managed edge case handling

• Human-led operations support focused on improving the customer experience in critical times, such as serious ill health and death
• Full visibility through our self-service panel - Upfront, enabling access to all information generated by the Investment API via a convenient, modern user interface

Mission critical infrastructure

Upvest is on a mission to empower 100 million people across Europe and the UK to take control of their financial futures through investing. Our SIPP offering is central to this mission, following in the steps of our UK ISA and GIA offerings and the development of local pensions and tax wrappers across Europe (such as the Altersvorsorgedepot in Germany and Plan d'Épargne en Actions in France).

Building and launching local tax and pension wrappers across multiple European markets has taught us one thing above all: the product you launch today is not the product you will need in three years. So, it has to be built for change from day one.

That principle shapes everything we build, and in particular the foundations of our pension infrastructure. We have taken the essential elements of the pension journey: onboarding and identity, contribution handling and limits, tax relief, order execution and custody, transfers and consolidation, documentation, reporting, and decumulation, and built each as a separate service within the API. The components common to every market are built once - for use everywhere -  then translated locally by country and by wrapper type.

The practical consequence is that changes can be surgically delivered where required, rather than impacting the whole offering. For example, an update to contribution limits, tax relief mechanics or reporting obligations only touches the relevant API service that owns that rule. Additionally, any structural changes –  of which there are already many scheduled (from the rise in normal minimum pension age to the changing inheritance tax treatment of unused pension funds) - are absorbed as an update to a defined component, without requiring a full re-build of the product around it.

Upvest’s entire solution is built on a cloud-native infrastructure that is designed to scale as clients grow, enabling them to handle millions of end users and transactions with 99.99% uptime and certified reliability. Upvest’s Investment API enables automation of over 99% of processes across the entire value chain, allowing clients to focus on the user experience and product shelf, instead of manual operations. 

For our clients, how we’ve designed and built our SIPP enables a high-level of tailoring to their target customer base; whether it’s via inclusion of specific asset classes or offering particular decumulation journeys, we provide the necessary component parts to build a compelling and compliant offering. 

Some of what is coming is already known, but most of it is not. A SIPP opened by a 25-year-old today will still be running in the 2070s, through regulatory regimes not yet drafted and with asset classes not yet invented. While we can’t predict every change ahead, we can make sure that when these changes arrive they are easy to absorb for us and our clients - always striving to meet and exceed the needs of the modern pension investor.

Get in touch with our experts to explore how Upvest can power your modern SIPP offering.

Disclaimer: This article was written in September 2026. It is intended for educational and informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial or investment advice. Always conduct thorough research and seek professional guidance before making any investment decisions. The past performance of any investment does not guarantee future results.

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