Austrian employees will soon be asked to give up a capital guarantee on their retirement savings, yet almost none of the country’s life insurers can show them what that trade-off could cost.
That is the central warning of a new report from Kidbrooke, which assesses how ready Austria’s life insurance market is for the country’s 2027 pension reform.
The reform, according to the Kidbrooke report, marks a significant shift in responsibility. From 2027, workers can move the severance capital they have accumulated since 2003 into a fund-based retirement product with no capital guarantee. These savings may grow faster, but they can also fall in value, and once a product is chosen the money remains locked in until retirement. For the first time, one of the routes opened by the reform leads into a life-insurance policy chosen by the employee herself. Kidbrooke’s report points out that this places the decision to abandon a guarantee with the individual rather than the employer, which makes what an insurer can actually show a customer critically important.
To examine this, Kidbrooke designed what its report calls a “couch test”. The scenario imagines a 34-year-old in Vienna, late at night, who has read that the state pension will replace less of her salary than it did for her father’s generation. She picks up her phone, opens an insurer’s website and asks two simple questions: how much might she end up with, and could it go down?
Kidbrooke put that question to eleven Austrian life insurers in July 2026, including the three largest by premium share and together representing an estimated 70% of the Austrian life market. The report’s authors used only what any customer could see before logging in or booking an adviser appointment, and re-verified every result live in September.
The findings in the Kidbrooke report are stark. Six of the eleven insurers displayed a projected figure, and four of those allowed customers to create a customised estimate. The remaining five showed no projection anywhere in the online journey. Crucially, none of the eleven presented a range of outcomes across different risk levels while a saver was making her decision. Only one insurer allowed a loss to be seen at all, and only if the customer knew to select a negative return from a dropdown menu.
The report scored each insurer on five factors: whether any projected outcome was visible, whether it showed in numbers that the value can vary, whether it could be reached without a login or appointment, whether a genuine self-service journey existed, and how non-guaranteed products were framed. Firms were grouped into tiers rather than ranked. Kidbrooke is clear that it did not assess advice quality, product quality, pricing or financial strength.
Kidbrooke concludes that scenario-based digital retirement planning is largely missing from onboarding. Most insurers sell sophisticated products with thorough documentation on risk categories, yet few can show a customer what any of it means for her.
The report also challenges the industry’s explanation for the problem. Insurers have widely attributed Austrians’ difficulty picturing their retirement savings to poor financial literacy. Kidbrooke argues that while better financial education is needed, it is hard for anyone to picture a pension that can fall when almost nobody publishes the numbers that would reveal it.
Kidbrooke acknowledges that Austria’s pension market is driven mainly by brokers, tied agents and bank branches, and that a skilled adviser can explain outcomes better than any website. However, the report argues that once the guarantee disappears, advisers will need a clear way to show clients results across good and bad markets, backed by an auditable record that the client saw them.
Kidbrooke describes the report as a baseline rather than a verdict. It plans to repeat the same test, using the same scoring, after the reform takes effect, and has invited insurers to flag any tools or figures it may have missed.
For more insights, read the full report here.
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