Encouraging Retirement Savings in Malaysia: A Behavioural Perspective

Malaysia’s transition towards becoming an aged nation is rapidly occurring. Longstanding issues of inadequate coverage of pension schemes and low levels of retirement savings amongst the public has been made worse over the Covid-19 pandemic. We argue that a holistic approach to ensuring the well-being of future retirees must include efforts to overcome behavioural biases that are inhibiting Malaysians from making better savings decisions. In this paper, we use a personas-based solutioning framework, which firstly involves segregating the Malaysian labour force into five personas, namely: youth, gig workers, middle income, to-be retirees, and entrepreneurs. Then, we identify the behavioural challenges that are affecting each segment and propose several behaviourally informed interventions that aim to overcome the biases present and encourage better retirement planning amongst Malaysians.