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Robert Higginbotham, Fidelity's President, believes the industry just isn't doing enough, “For years if not decades the customer has been in a weak position because of a malfunctioning market.” His solution is to provide greater value for money and greater transparency so that customers understand what they are buying.David Pitt-Watson from Hermes Focus Asset Management says high fees levied by Britain’s pensions system are adding to peoples' woes, “If you pay a 1% charge on your pension it's likely to reduce the pension you receive each year by 25%”.

Reducing charges was a significant theme of the conference along with how the industry would cope with the auto enrolment into the proposed NEST pension scheme .

The industry also faces new rules from the FSA banning commission payments, meaning clients will have to pay fees for independent advice. Andrew Fisher CEO of financial advisors Towry says “people have no problem paying fees, what they object to is paying too much for poor value for money or actually paying, when they don't know they are paying, and then being told afterwards they've been ripped off.”David Nish Chief Executive of Standard Life says, "The government is considering the introduction of auto enrolment. It's very much something I would support because this begins to get people into savings vehicles"

David McCarthy from Imperial College says, “ I think there are enough financial products out there already the focus over the next few years should be getting those products to work better. I think we need to embrace defined contribution pension schemes,”

More radical solutions were proposed by Michael Johnson from the Centre for Policy Studies, “Lets use the current £3 billion a year or so of tax relief for pensions and redeploy a chunk of that to boost the basic state pension and lets make Nest compulsory for the public sector.”In 2011 the government plans to launch NEST, the National Employment Savings Trust, a new workplace pension scheme that's being designed specifically to meet the needs of low-to-moderate earners and their employers.

Universities Minister David Willetts confirmed the government is also planning to raise the retirement age. “We are looking to get rid of the idea of a compulsory retirement age so we give people the opportunity of working longer as well.”

The private sector is characterised by thousands of small pension schemes and Lindsay Tomlinson, Chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds, says there is a need to get scale, “One solution is a limited number of super trusts, multi employer, based on some of the existing funds already in place and open to auto enrolment.”

Employers are looking to the industry for new solutions too. Neil Carberry, the CBI’s head of pensions, confirmed that just as many employers are providing pensions schemes now as did in the sixties and points out “the workplace is the best place to offer mass market saving for the future.”

John Pollock Chief Executive of Legal & General's Risk Business believes straight DC schemes are the best option but acknowledges that they place more risk on individuals especially risk associated with how long they will live. “So a system that delivers to the individual with a higher degree of certainty is one which I think we would wish to see.”

Mark Tennant, from conference sponsor JP Morgan, commenting after the conference, said that risk had been one of the most important themes, “The industry just hasn't been able to get over to the client what that one word 'risk' means. Its about failure to achieve the customers objectives, it's as simple and as complicated as that.”