Project partners were chosen with the aim of covering all aspects that are important for  the topic (finance, insurance, optimization). Regarding institutions, pension systems differ across Europe. Having partners from Denmark, Italy and Liechtenstein ensures that three different institutional 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, one of the partners (Schantz) has been chosen for
its industry expertise and first-hand experience with pension planning software.

The partnership was established on the basis of long-standing research collaboration and institutional contacts between all key people involved. Whereas both universities do have prior experience with EU projects, Schantz is a newcomer to the action (but does have, of course, a lot of experience from related projects with other partners like banks and insurance companies). Development of the online courses will be the main task of the two universities involved, while development of the pension planning software will be taken care of mainly by Schantz. All partners will work together to ensure the integration of the software into the online courses, i.e., the functionality of the software will reflect the contents of the online courses, and the software will be used within some of the modules.