I’m not a big video man – who wants to spend 3 minutes of your working  day watching with the sound off – good news with this one is that it’s got sub-titles! The other good bit is that it is genuinely funny and the production values are first rate.

So here’s what Adolf was getting worked up about.

Supposing he’d been running a bureau with 100 clients relying on him to run the payroll and the auto-enrolment.

Let’s say he was running pensions with NEST, one of the providers that don’t use straight through processing but demand that you upload CSV files, wait for the confirmatory email and then complete the process, and that you’re doing this 90 times a pay period. You’d be going bonkers!

And now let’s think of the problems when he’d have had fiddling around with the fields of the CSV file for every provider (there are reportedly 47 separate interfaces)! If that had been you, you’d be as hot under your leather coat as the Fuhrer,

And this is precisely what it’s going to be like for said bureaux (I’m not suggesting that they are all run from a bunker with Adolf in charge).

But I do know there is something that can be done about this, that it can be done and in before April 2015 and that it can be adopted by all the leading the pension providers before the Tsunami of auto-enrolment hits next year (see chart).

We reckon by this time next year, the capacity of the IFA community to hold the hands of clients (the line starting with the green spot ending with the red spot) will have fallen below the demand for those services and that it will remain below demand for the remain 30 months of the staging process.

There is simply insufficient capacity in the market to manage the Tsunami of schemes from April 2015 onwards.

Which is why we need a common data standard and straight through processing if we are to avoid a big cock-up.

The good news-

The good news is that we see genuine steps being taken to create such a data standard. More on this in blogs to come. But for now- take it away Adolf.