Guernsey Pension Seminar 2026: The Home of Global Mobility - Keynote Address

Helen Dean CBE 

Hello, everybody. I’m Helen Dean, and I’ve spent most of my working life in pensions. Now, that either reassures people or it makes their eyes glaze over, usually the latter. But actually, I think pensions are fascinating, and they’re fascinating because they tell you something about how society thinks about its future, where society is going to because pensions are looking, by their very nature, ahead all of the time. 

Now for years, I thought I really understood retirement saving. I thought you worked, you stayed broadly in one country, you often stayed with one employer for a good part of your career, and your pension quietly did its thing in the background. You didn’t have to worry about it too much; it wasn’tglamourous. Nobody wrote any poetry about it, but it was reliable. 

Then a few years ago, I had a conversation that made me think maybe things are a little bit different, and maybe things are changing. And it was a conversation with a young engineer. He’d started a career in the UK, then he’d moved to Dubai, then he moved to Australia, all before turning 40. He had three pension pots in three countries and, as he put it, he had absolutely no idea what to do with them. He wasn’t really interested in performance, he wasn’t interested in charges; they were not the things at the top of his agenda. All he was really interested in was, does this thing travel with me and if not, why not? And that question, I guess, has stayed with me a little bit because I think the same issue applies increasingly to many people.  

So if you're a tech founder running a company with employees in five countries, or actually we heard from Alessandra earlier in this event about having 40 – four-zero – countries to manage, or if you're a nurse working in the NHS who then relocates to another country, or if you're a management consultant who never stays in the same place for any more than three years, they're all completely different lives, but they've got the same concern, and that's when I realised that for many people things have changed. They haven't changed loudly, they've changed quite quietly, but the world of work has changed quite fundamentally for many people. Today's professionals are often changing employers, sometimes as many as 10 times in their career. Around one in four people under 40 expects to work in another country at some point in their career, and since 2020, remote and cross-border working has grown more than fourfold - fourfold.  

You know, that's not evolution, that's acceleration. Borders are softer, careers are more fluid, talent is global, but pensions, nah, they haven't kept up, they're still largely national, and that gap between how we live and how we save is perhaps where today's opportunity really sits. I think there are four forces driving that shift; firstly globalisation, not just multinational banks, but tech firms, lots of different companies. They want to hire the very best talent they can wherever they live. Second is digital innovation, that's opened up lots of opportunities. 10 years ago, opening an international pension involved paper forms, signatures in black ink, a certain amount of patience while all the bureaucracy worked its way through, not today. Today, most financial accounts are open digitally, identity checks are automated, contributions could be set up online, technology has removed a lot of that friction, and when you remove that friction, international savings stops feeling exotic and starts becoming a much easier option. The third is changing work patterns, so people have portfolio careers, they have hybrid working, they have contract roles, they're freelancing across different time zones. And finally, geography. We are seeing, I think, significant movement from the UK and Europe to the Middle East. Typically, what used to be perhaps a one- or two-year expat stint is now a decade-long chapter of someone's life.  

All of this changes the nature of saving. It's not a ripple, it's actually a structural change, and when you live a mobile life like that, your priorities do change. Surveys show that over 60% of internationally mobile workers rank portability, just like that engineer I met all those years ago, they rank portability as their number one retirement concern, actually above even tax benefits. It's a profound shift, because portability becomes priceless when your life crosses borders, because it gives you continuity. People want one financial thread that runs throughout their career, they want something that they don't have to reset every time they move country, and international pensions and savings potentially can provide that thread, and that's why I think they're moving from niche to normal for many, many people.  

Longevity adds another layer, and you know we're living longer. Life expectancy has increased by roughly 10 years over the past half century alone, so retirement isn't a short epilogue anymore to the end of your life, it's a 20-to-30-year chapter where you can do all sorts of things, and increasingly that retirement is spent somewhere different from where the pension was built up. So international structures are increasingly becoming the places where people can simplify, consolidate, and create certainty, and I think employers are feeling that too. Global benefits used to belong to multinationals, not anymore. More than half of growing businesses are employing or contracting internationally in some way. International pension solutions, as we heard earlier in this session, are becoming part of pension strategy of any employers, part of an employer identity, and crucially, now they're becoming accessible for SMEs too.  

So, where does Guernsey fit in all of this? Well, I think quite naturally it fits at the centre of this evolution. Guernsey offers stability, it offers credibility, it offers deep cross-border expertise, it has innovative pension structures and critically it has a trusted regulatory environment. I think that's why positioning Guernsey as the home of global mobility doesn't just have to be a slogan, it can be a statement of strategic intent.  

But I'd perhaps like to leave you with an even bigger thought: if mobility is becoming the norm, if careers are increasingly spanning across continents, if retirement is lasting for decades, then international saving structures aren't just products, they're part of the global infrastructure of modern work. We are building the financial architecture, potentially, that supports a borderless generation. That's really significant. It's not just about keeping up with change, it's about shaping it.  

The next generation of professionals will assume that their pension travels with them just as naturally as their phone number does, just as naturally as their LinkedIn profile does, just as naturally as their cloud storage does, they won't ask whether it works internationally. They'll expect it to, and jurisdictions that anticipate that expectation have an opportunity to lead. Guernsey has the opportunity not just to participate in the future, but to shape it, because it seems like global mobility is not just a passing phase, it's part of the new architecture of work for many people. That's exciting, it's important, and it's why this event today really matters. Thank you so much, and I look forward to continuing this conversation.