WealthTech firm Kidbrooke has identified a structural gap threatening the Netherlands’ WTP transition: insurers hold the participant data advisers urgently need, but no working connection between the two exists in practice.
Picture a typical annual review, an employer with 80 staff, a signed transitieplan, and a transition date months away. The adviser has handled scheme design, compensation, and the offerte. Then the employer asks what to tell employees when the transitieoverzicht arrives. The adviser has no answer. Nothing in their current workflow connects the insurer’s participant data to client-facing scenario analysis. According to Kidbrooke, this is not an effort problem, it is a tooling problem, and only insurers are positioned to solve it.
Regulation has already assigned the responsibility
The gap matters because regulation has already assigned the responsibility. The AFM concluded in 2024 that informing employees about transition choices is a shared obligation between adviser and pension provider. Joint guidance from Adfiz and the Verbond van Verzekeraars reinforces this, positioning advisers as responsible for ensuring transitieplan communications are written with genuine participant understanding in mind — not merely legal sufficiency. The adviser is not a distribution channel who hands off once a contract is placed. By the AFM’s own framing, they are a co-responsible actor in the communication chain.
Capacity alone will not close the gap
The operational pressure makes this harder to close through effort alone. The Government Commissioner’s fourth report, published January 2026, noted that advisers carry an aanjagende rol, a responsibility to push employers toward timely conversion, yet acknowledged the role is not being fulfilled universally.
The number of qualified pension advisers has fallen, and conversion processes take between two and six quarters on average. That same month, the AFM wrote to more than 900 pension offices designating 2026 as the decisive year, while still receiving signals that not all advisers had begun. Kidbrooke’s position is that participant communication capability will only be built if it is integrated into existing adviser workflows, not bolted on as a separate manual process atop an already stretched pipeline.
Why only the insurer can bridge both sides
Insurers uniquely hold three things simultaneously: participant data, the full product, and the regulatory communication obligation. Advisers have employer relationships. Employers have workforces. But only the insurer can connect those relationships to participant-level calculation capability. Kidbrooke also notes this distinguishes insurers structurally from PPIs, which cannot carry insurance risk or offer guaranteed outcomes directly, reinforcing the insurer’s role as the only party that can underpin a coherent participant communication proposition.
Kidbrooke’s KidbrookeOne platform is designed to close this gap directly. Its forecasting and scenario simulation APIs surface participant-specific was/wordt projections at both the adviser’s employer meeting and the participant’s keuzebegeleiding environment, drawing on the insurer’s existing participant data.
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