The Intelligent Pensions Push

Published in Pensions Week, 14th March 2011

A Google search for ‘Pension’ gives 74.3 million results in 0,2 seconds. Type in ‘Pensions Week’ and even before I press Enter, I am asked whether I want the magazine, the awards or whether my query is related to David Rowley or James Redgrave. It is amazing how Google searches tens of billions of pages to pinpoint the specific page we are searching for.

Now enter stage left onto the floor of the average pensions company in the United Kingdom and you may be forgiven if you were to believe that you had stepped into a Kafka novel, with a well defined bureaucracy, cupboards full of paper, boxes overflowing with micro fiche and earnest looking employees tapping away on calculators.

You may wonder whether the internet has passed these people by. But no, they are on LinkedIn, Facebook, tweeting, texting and watching football via streaming video. So why is there this chasm between their private and corporate technology capabilities?

For example, imagine an employee or HR representative scanning a marriage certificate on a multifunctional device quite common in most offices. Intelligent software already has the capability to recognise the type of document and recommend a variety of next steps.

Does the document need to be forwarded to HR, the reward department and the pension team? Would the employee like to update their ‘Expression of Wish’ form or add their spouse to their private medical arrangement? Perhaps getting married may change their attitude to risk, so should we therefore remind them of their DC fund choice? Or in this new Corporate Wrap world, enquire about their interest in a mortgage at a special company rate? Does the DB pension system need to update the requirement for a spouse’s pension, which automatically updates the Actuarial valuation? Of course, the Trustees should be able to log into their Trustee dashboard and track all of this in real time.

The catch is that in the global world we live Marriage Certificates come in all shapes, sizes and languages. The beauty of technology is that today it can recognise most languages and translate it into appropriately. Optical Character Recognition makes the size and shape of the paper irrelevant.

We have seen this happening in the world of personal finance where we are able to log into a single portal to track our savings account, credit card balance, ISA’s, mortgage repayment and stock market investments. The market is increasingly requesting this ease of access in the workplace.

Pensions companies are spending large amounts of money and time on developing that perfect mix of product and service backed by seamless technology for the workplace. The winning answer will be defined not by a self serving strategy to sell financial products, but looking at ways to truly add value to Trustees, HR and employees.

For further information on the future of technology in pensions email girishmenezes @ hotmail.com