What a new BPFI survey adds to a problem I've written about before: the psychology and the affordability gap sitting on top of an already-complicated tax system.
I've written before about how genuinely complicated Irish investment tax actually is: gross roll-up, deemed disposal every eight years whether you've sold anything or not, a separate CGT regime for direct shares, no simple annual allowance like the UK's ISA has had for over two decades. That complexity is real, the exit tax cut from 41% to 38% in January was only a first step, and simplifying all of it properly is a large part of what the SIA is meant to fix.
The Banking & Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI) published new research this month that adds two further layers on top of that picture, one psychological and one much harder to talk around.
Fear of loss is a separate barrier, and it's a big one
Ask people directly why they haven't invested, and the top answer is affordability. 61% say they don't have enough money to invest. I'll come back to that number properly below, because it deserves more than a passing mention.
Look past affordability, and the next two barriers are more interesting: 49% say they worry about losing money, and 48% say they don't know enough about their options. Dig into the psychology further and it gets sharper still. 76% of all adults say they're uncomfortable with the idea that some or all of an investment could be lost, and 66% are uncomfortable with the idea of no guaranteed return.
That's not a knowledge gap you close with a better explainer video, and it's not the tax system either. That's loss aversion, a well-documented, deeply human bias that no amount of tax simplification changes on its own. It shows up most strongly among people who already describe themselves as risk-averse (55% of them cite fear of loss as a barrier, compared to 35% of those comfortable with moderate or higher risk), which tells you it's the dominant force for the exact people the SIA is trying to bring off the sidelines.
There's an old saying that fortune favours the brave, and loss aversion is precisely why so few people act on it. It's also why one of the more persistent stories told in investing circles, hard to verify with precision but repeated often enough to be worth knowing, is that some of the best-performing individual accounts at large investment firms have belonged to people who forgot the account existed, or who had since passed away. Why? Because nobody panicked during a downturn and sold. Nobody checked the balance every week and talked themselves out of staying invested. The money was simply left alone to do what markets tend to do over long periods. Whatever the precise truth of any one version of that story, it points at something real: the fear of watching a paper loss happen in real time often does more damage to an outcome than the loss itself ever would.
The elephant in the room: affordability
I don't want to move past that 61% too quickly, because I think it's the most important number in the entire survey, and it points at something uncomfortable that's worth saying plainly rather than working around.
There's a real paradox sitting inside that figure. The people who would benefit most from decades of compounding growth, young families, people early in their working lives, are very often the same people with the least room in a monthly budget to start. Left unaddressed, that's exactly how wealth gaps widen instead of closing. The people who already have money invested keep compounding it. The people who don't, can't get started in the first place. It's not a comfortable thing to put on a company blog, but I'd rather say it plainly than talk around it.
I also think it's a completely fair and understandable position for people to be in right now. Cost of living has kept climbing, inflation has been persistent, and for a lot of families "invest more" isn't useful advice when there's genuinely nothing left at the end of the month to invest. No product, mine included, fixes that on its own. I'm not going to pretend a better app changes what's sitting in someone's bank account, and I'd be selling something false if I implied otherwise.
What I think a product like this can genuinely do is lower the amount that needs to matter, and remove the moment where someone has to decide to move a lump sum they don't have. €10 or €20 a month, automated the same way a much larger pension contribution already is for someone with more room to spare, is still real money working over eighteen years instead of sitting still, or never existing at all. It won't close the gap on its own. But it's a genuine attempt at finally making money work for people who've rarely had enough of it to make work before, rather than building something that only ever made sense for people who already had money to spare.
People want to start small, automatically, without deciding
If fear and affordability are the two big barriers, the survey also points to what lowers both. When asked what would make a new investment account appealing, the top-rated features weren't about product sophistication. They were about simplicity. 83% say it's important that an account is easy to open and understand. 76% want the ability to contribute small amounts regularly. 77% want easy, flexible withdrawals.
Put those together and a pattern emerges, it's that people don't want to make one big, anxiety-inducing decision to "start investing." They want a small, automatic, reversible habit that doesn't feel like a bet, and doesn't require them to first become an expert in gross roll-up or find a spare lump sum.
Where the money would come from
One more finding matters for how any new account gets funded in practice. Of those interested in an SIA, 60% say the money would come from savings, either money already sitting in a deposit account, or money they'd planned to save anyway. Only a small minority see it as money that would otherwise go elsewhere. In other words, the SIA isn't likely to compete with spending. It's likely to compete with an underperforming deposit account, exactly the €170B+ sitting in low-yield Irish household savings that started this whole conversation in the first place.
What this means for how I'm building
I'm designing Legacy around the behaviour this data actually shows. Set up a standing order once, the same way most people already have a pension contribution set up, or a mortgage payment, or a bill, and from that point on it just happens. One day a month, without a decision to make, without logging in, without a moment where fear of loss gets a chance to creep in. Whether that's the €140 Child Benefit payment into a child's account today, or a smaller regular amount into an account of your own as the platform grows, the mechanic is the same: automatic by default, not because Legacy is pulling the money on your behalf, but automatic in the way a standing order with your own bank already is for millions of people. It's a direct response to the "small amounts, regularly, without having to decide each time" pattern this survey describes, and it doesn't ask a parent to understand deemed disposal, or find a lump sum, first.
The SIA is still a plan, not a product
Nearly half of adults (48%) are already aware that the government plans to introduce a Savings and Investment Account, and interest runs high once people understand what's being proposed: 79% express at least some interest, and 77% support a simple tax-free allowance on gains. But as I've written about in more detail already, contribution limits, exact tax treatment, and launch timing are still to be confirmed ahead of Budget 2027. I'm building for the direction of travel, not claiming the destination has arrived. Read my full breakdown of what's actually confirmed on the SIA so far →
The opportunity, and the gap
The most striking gap in this data isn't about the SIA itself. It's about who knows it's coming. Awareness climbs sharply with age: 72% of over-55s are aware, compared to just 25% of 18-34 year-olds. That's the exact demographic, younger parents, who stand to benefit most from starting early, and who are currently the least informed that a new option is on the way.
That's the gap I think is worth closing. Not by simplifying the tax system myself, that's the Government's job, and not by pretending affordability isn't real, but by building something so simple and so small to start that complexity, fear, and the size of the first contribution all matter less than they do today. That's the same principle behind Legacy: a single standing order instead of a series of ongoing decisions, a smaller, more concrete version of exactly what this survey is describing at a national scale.
Gavin Eiffe, Founder and CEO of Legacy Financial Technologies Ltd.
Legacy provides a technology platform, not financial or tax advice. The value of investments can fall as well as rise. Capital is at risk.
Source: BPFI Savings and Investments Survey, June 2026, conducted by Amárach Research among a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults in the Republic of Ireland.