According to research by BNY Mellon and the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, the financial services industry is failing to connect with younger people or ‘millennials’, 58% of whom said they had not seen products targeted at people like them.

Millennials want products which demonstrate clearly that they are being rewarded for tying up their money.

This is not simply a question of the medium of communication – less than 1% of millennials globally want financial services providers to connect with them through social media.

The study looked at their saving priorities, attitudes to retirement planning, and expectations around different types of financial institutions across seven markets – the UK, Australia, Brazil, China, Japan, the Netherlands and the US.

It found that UK participants saved 12% of their income, compared to the average of 24% across all the countries surveyed. 59% of UK millennials expected to have access to the same sources of retirement income as their parents, compared to just 16% in Japan and 84% in Australia.

UK millennials expected to retire at 65 – three years before the projected UK retirement age of 68 expected to apply by the mid-2040s – and live to 85 years of age.

“This study of millennials by millennials reveals the disconnect that the financial services industry has with this generation,” said Janet Smart, Undergraduate Course Director at Saïd Business School.

“The challenge for insurers is to find new ways to engage millennials, so as to improve their level of financial understanding and build their commitment to retirement planning.”

Shayantan Rahman, studying Economics and Management at Saïd Business School, said: “What struck me is that while millennials are generally comfortable about being targeted by consumer brands through social media, they do not want financial services providers using these channels to contact them.

“Rather than being the solution for helping insurers engage with millennials, many told us they think it makes them look ‘silly’, ‘pally’ or ‘creepy’.”

The techniques insurers used to engage with baby-boomers did not always work with millennials.

“Insurers and other financial services providers need to reach out to millennials in different ways”, said Paul Traynor, International Insurance Industry Lead at BNY Mellon.

“In the short term, insurers should identify millennials as a distinct target for marketing activity and find avenues to better equip parents to advise their children.

“In the long term insurers need to think of innovative ways of working with policy makers to move away from a single purpose tax-incentivised retirement pot toward a tax-incentivised savings pot that allows for a certain number of lifetime drawdowns.”