Project partners were chosen with the aim of covering all aspects that are important for the topic (finance, insurance, savings, real estate and optimization). Regarding long-term saving, opportunities and habits/cultures differ across Europe. Having partners from Denmark, Italy and Liechtenstein ensures that three different cultural systems are represented within the project. Since the focus is on education, two of the three partners are higher education institutions (the University of Liechtenstein and the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano). The people involved have a significant track record in the field of life-cycle financial planning and related methods, as well as multi-year experience with online learning. To bring in also the industry perspective required for the software tool, which we consider an extremely valuable part of the online courses, the head programmer/project responsible person from Keylane A/S (the industry partner from the predecessor project “UNPIE: Understanding Pensions in Europe”) has left Keylane A/S and founded his own company “Alguru ApS“, bringing in his industry expertise on life-cycle planning software. Despite being basically a one-person company, Emil Østergaard (the founder and CEO of Alguru ApS) has done an incredible job in programming and designing online software applications for open online learning environments in our previous project.

The partnership was established on the basis of long-standing research collaboration and institutional contacts between all key people involved. As mentioned before, all three partners have already successfully collaborated in the predecessor project UNPIE. Development of the online courses will be the main task of the two universities involved, while development of the software applications will be taken care of mainly by Alguru IVS. All partners will work together to ensure a seamless integration of the applications into the online courses, i.e., the functionality of the applications will reflect the contents of the online courses, and the applications will be used within some of the modules.