Interview with Brooke Day, Head of Brand and Communications at PensionBee

A career in finance may not be everyone’s first choice, especially if their roles had previously been in retail and e-commerce, and they preferred shopping to saving and investing!

Find out then, how Brooke Day has been surprised at how much she’s enjoying her role as Head of Brand and Communications at PensionBee, and what she’s learned about women and personal finances.

What’s your career background?

I’m a University of Nottingham alumni, graduating in 2011 with a BA Hons in English Studies. After university, I embarked on a career in Journalism undertaking multiple internships across publishing houses such as Hearst, Vogue and The Telegraph.

I have been fortunate enough that my career has spanned multiple agency and in-house content roles across the last 10+ years. Most notably I’ve worked at Zenith, part of the Publicis Groupe, where I worked across Harvey Nichols, Mercedes and Next.

My trajectory into heading up content, brand and communications for a Fintech hasn’t been traditional, in fact I’ve spent the majority of my career working either at, or for, retail and e-commerce brands such as Next, Harvey Nichols and Farfetch rather than working in personal finance. I have to admit, it’s not something I ever thought I would do, let alone enjoy like I do now!

When and why did you join PensionBee?

I joined PensionBee in 2022 as Head of Content and became Head of Brand and Communications in January 2023. 

I was really attracted to the mission of PensionBee of building pension confidence as well as their values, especially the value of love. As someone who also didn’t consider themselves pension confident prior to joining, I liked the challenge of what the business was trying to achieve and really felt like my experience and values could contribute to this. In terms of their values, I’d never come across a company with the value of love and this really was something I felt I could get behind.

What does your day-to-day job entail?

As the Head of Brand and Communications, my days can be quite varied! I am responsible for creating the brand assets which we can use to promote PensionBee. Most recently this has meant working on our latest ATL campaign ‘When your pension is in a good place, you’re in a good place’ which is running across 2025 on TV, radio and online channels. You can watch these here.

For this I was working on everything from the concept of the idea alongside our creative agency, The Builders Arms, through to production, casting, post-production and delivery of the campaign assets.

Additionally, I am responsible for creating communications plans for product launches such as our Climate Plan, the latest in our sustainable pension offering here at PensionBee. I help customers understand what the new plan is and why they may want to join. Similarly, I look after how to communicate to our different customer groups, tailoring what we say based on their needs.

I also lead on brand partnerships, looking for other businesses with similar missions and values to help reach our core audiences.

And finally I look after our tone of voice, acting as the brand guardian for how we want to be seen and heard as a brand.

What’s PensionBee’s mission?

Our mission is to build pension confidence. It drives our daily activities and encompasses everything we do for our customers. 

What is the pension gap?

Simply put, the gender pension gap is the difference between the value of men’s and women’s pension pots. It can be measured at any point in time but it’s particularly large when women approach retirement as it takes many years to accumulate and build up a pension.

According to our own research here at PensionBee, on average the gender pension gap is 38% between men and women.

What do you think causes the gender pensions gap?

There are two major drivers of the gender pension gap. These are the gender pay gap and an unequal number of annual paid working hours.

Women are more likely to cut down on paid employment to take responsibility for a larger share of unpaid caregiving and housework. The prohibitive costs of professional childcare services pressure families to choose one parent, typically the mother, to leave or reduce paid employment to care for children.

Too often the onus is placed on women to close the gender pension gap, by changing their behaviour. This isn’t fair or effective. Policy interventions are required to support increased male participation in care responsibilities, freeing up more of women’s time to participate in paid employment. 

What is PensionBee doing to help narrow the pension gap?

By modelling potential policy interventions, PensionBee has found that the most effective way to close the gender pension gap is for men and women to work equal hours, at equal pay.

To achieve this, employers must offer gender-inclusive parental leave. By doing this, it’ll allow anyone who becomes a new parent to take an equal amount of paid leave and all new parents, regardless of gender, can receive this. At PensionBee we have a gender inclusive Parental Leave policy.

Here’s what else we’re doing to try to help narrow the gender pension gap.

We make pensions simple

As a business we are committed to making pensions simple, so that everyone can enjoy a happy retirement. This includes women. As a part of my role, I am looking to ensure that there is gender parity in our own customer base. From 2022 to 2024 this has grown from 38% to 42%. We’re making good progress and still pushing for 50%. 

We’re a female-led company

PensionBee’s a female-led company with women making up more than 50% of employees and our Board. We want to see the same equality that we have in our workforce and Board across our customer base too.

We’re trying to educate and help as many women as we can

PensionBee allocates marketing spend to both retaining and increasing the number of female customers. This includes through product-focused tailored marketing campaigns to reach higher numbers of female investors, for example our gender pension gap campaign, live events, webinar masterclasses, editorial, video and audio as well as newsletter campaigns and sponsoring podcasts.

We’re trying to reach as many women as we can and firstly educate them on the gender pension gap and support them on what they can do to close it.

We include women in our marketing

I’d also say it’s about a conscious commitment to diversity and inclusion through all marketing channels whether that’s TV ads, podcast panels or website images. To feel included, many women want to see themselves in a brand’s marketing activity, this could be through using real people in advertising, something we are committed to doing at PensionBee, with our customers always featured at the heart of our campaigns.

We’re trying to change the image of financial services

Women want to be seen at board levels in businesses and they want to identify with the products and services being sold to them. Particularly within the realms of financial services, women perceive the industry as ‘unwelcoming, patronising, and male-dominated‘.

Many financial products, especially investment products, are often marketed towards men. This in itself, creates a culture where women view investing as ‘not for them’. These invisible barriers prevent some women from confidently making investment decisions.

Beyond what we do as a marketing team, we’ve modelled potential policy interventions to understand how to close it.

Have you always been good with money?

Absolutely not! I actually appeared on our own podcast to discuss my financial personality type and I’d say I am a shopper naturally. I definitely enjoy shopping and it’s something I’ve had to work hard at curbing a little more. I liked the dopamine hit it gives you as a sense of reward.

I am not sure if its age, priority or my role, or a mix of all three but I now place equal emphasis on being an investor too. I want to enjoy the present but I also want to make sure I am investing for a happy retirement too.

How important is sustainable investing?

It’s so important, we have such power with our pensions to change climate change and it’s not something to underestimate. Campaigning group MMMM say that greening our pensions is the most powerful thing we can do to protect the planet.

There’s £3 trillion in UK pensions – and that’s our money. Right now it’s invested without our say in companies driving deforestation and funding fossil fuels. Greening our pensions cuts our carbon footprint 21x more than going veggie, giving up flying and switching energy providers.

It’s great that companies, like us at PensionBee, provide the opportunity to invest in line with your values. Our Climate Plan for example allows you to take your climate action to the next level with your pension. You can invest in companies actively reducing their carbon emissions. So if that’s something that’s important to you, you have the power to do it and make a difference!

What would you say to someone who hasn’t yet started investing in a pension?

It’s never too late. The best time to start a pension is yesterday! The second best time is today. But it’s important to know its definitely not too late to begin pension saving at 35, 45, or even 55, but it does become trickier to build up a pot to sustain you in retirement, so you’ll have to pull out all the stops using the tips and tricks below.

Using something like a Pension Calculator will help you understand how much you need to save to achieve your retirement goals.

What’s your dream retirement?

For me it’s definitely going to include a lot of travel, exploring new hobbies and things I have never had time to during my working life and spending time with family and friends.

I have always wanted to renovate a van and travel in it, I hope I have time before I retire to start that off but if not that’s top of my list and then getting on the road and exploring in it. I have always loved learning languages, so dedicating time to learning another would also be something I’d like to achieve.