It’s always good to know who the movers and shakers in your world are. I know a few of the great and the good assembled at a DC roundtable by Pension Age. But many of these folk are new kids (at least on my block), so I thought I’d share what they said.
Sponsored by trustees, investment houses and consultants, this is like going to the PLSA investment conference without the £7k bill – or so I thought.
The discussion was over the future of DC – it is more than a quarter of the century that then Sainsbury’s Pension Manager “one f Jef the reff”, quipped
I have looked over the cliff and I have seen DC
but in terms of product development, the DC “pension” that Jef Prestridge knew – hasn’t changed much. Infact Kevin Wesbroom claimed at a not so recent DC conference that it hadn’t changed at all. Money goes in, gets invested and comes out later – then as an annuity , now as a cash sum with a big tax bill (well that’s how people who don’t go to round tables think.
Round table?
This photo of the event shows
- That the table was oblong
- A large amount of booze in place
Neither disqualifies the event from serious consideration but I’d be interested to know how many of the bottles of wine on the counter behind were consumed.
Debate
I have read the debate so you don’t have to but the link is here and of course you can read off SlideShare above
Pot for life
Violent agreement from everyone that while it would be nice to give people what they want (a pot for life) it would be better to give them what they don’t want (a bigger pension bill through the 2017 AE pension reforms). The great and the good have decided that “pay more” is the priority and that get a pot for life is a distraction.
Productive finance
The discussion , presumably over starters, drifted around for a bit with the usual concerns being expressed around fiduciary duties , costs and “mechanics” (the new word for administration). The discussion concluded with Donna Walsh introducing a dependency to Standard Life’s commitment to the Mansion House Compact
We signed up to the Mansion
House Compact but at the forefront of
our minds will always be whether it is
right for members. Will it have a positive
impact on member outcomes?
I thought the idea of the Compact that you’d decided that investment in productive finance was in everyone’s best interests, but what do I know?
Increasing participation in pensions
Having accepted that auto-enrolment was doing its job, the question moved on to financial education which people generally thought was pretty poor and people pretty un-clued up about the need to save more. Some thought was given to using AI which is the new “nudge”, a kind of universal solvent to the adequacy problem.
Interestingly , no-one in this discussion mentioned the state pension and the raising of its floor to provide basic security, this seemed to be where most people’s financial literacy is improving fast – purchase of added years of state pension (as state pension credits) suggests that people are listening – perhaps not to the right voices though.
A 20 year debate
And so the debate goes on , you have probably got the gist by now. The discussions ranged over the Government’s wish to see DC schemes becoming full service providers, the Dc to Dc transfer regulations (scam-stopping) and D E & I , there was much being said but not much to report other than buzz words such as “innovation” were set against the pragmatism that nothing much gets done.
I dug out a similar debate in Pension Age in 2006 One of the participants was Andy Cheseldine, the Chair this year.
Then (2006)
Now 2024
The questions being discussed are the same and the answers the same too. What’s happened in between is that DC has fixed its distribution problem and now has the auto-enrolment framework in place to make ideas like inclusivity and productive finance in DC more than a pipedream.
The key drivers of change in DC will come from the top (Government) and the bottom (what people do). Right now , I think people are ready for change, they want to combine pots and spend their pensions as pensions, they love the state pension , they are confused by workplace pensions turn out to be pots.
In terms of what people want, little has changed, in terms of the people delivering, much has changed – except of course for Andy Cheseldine – a rock of ages!
