Sam Downes has uncovered an extremity of ineptness within the pension system which she might take as a proxy for the investment service that drives the value of her money. Would I send a cheque to a provider, almost certainly not. A friend sent me a valuable item in the first class post last week, it is nowhere to be seen. We no more trust cheques than we do the Royal Mail.

Those who demand financial payments or data transfer by cheque or fax or similar are showing a lack of respect for the counterparty – their customer.  I know that everyone knows a 90 year old who won’t allow the internet into the house but the world of faster payments must treat them by exception, as vulnerable and not as the default customer.

And yet, people are still using the technology of yester year.

We had to do a lot of signing on Friday, there were curses as people travelled in from home to wet-sign and countersign one document. Couriers get involved snarling up traffic, polluting the atmosphere,  clean electronic processes are there for a reason.

We really don’t need to cut down trees to make paper to feed into printers and fax machines!

So why?

I guess it is because change is hard and if there is no incentive to improve – it doesn’t happen. This is such a commonplace I am almost ashamed to leave it on the screen, but it still needs saying.

Pension Pal is there to make pension transfers easy, you reach out to Pension Pal and ask for its software as a service and it happens. I recently set up a pension with Smart, within a couple of minutes I was aware of how easy it was to move my pots to them – because they have adopted Pension Pal. The software doesn’t make Smart a better investment but – for Sam Downes, it makes them a better fit.

Do we need Government to make this happen?

Categorically we don’t! Government made faster payments happen by unlocking the doors to open banking. It was one of the great successes of the last decade and it is now paying dividends (for everyone but unlucky Sam).

Every day, billions of financial transactions happening electronically because of the adoption of the open banking standards and we got this done quickly and efficiently because if we didn’t, Britain would have become uncompetitive in a global market that could have swamped us.

That we couldn’t have progressed the ideas behind open banking to the pension dashboard is because we lost our nerve and decided to apply the thinking of the 20th century to a 21st century problem. Instead of making it incumbent on all participations to adopt a series of protocols that lead to free-flow of data, we agonised that some might get left behind. We agonised over the 90 year old without internet instead of delivering the 99% solution and a process to deal with exceptions. The Dashboard Available Point is still years away.

And in the wake of that failure, failures like the one Richard and Sam and Alan highlight, persist.

We forget that most scams work as “pension liberation”.  If we try to capture pensions in a safe environment we induce frustration that leads people to those who can release them from 14 page due diligence questionnaires and cheques and the universal penny post!

I have seen scammers at work, they send people out to fill out forms, couriers to take forms away and they get five star trust pilot scores for being helpful. What isn’t mentioned is that they win because the consumer has already lost.

Wet signatures and the like are supposed to create the friction that stops seamless scamming, but they don’t. What creates scamming is frustration. The consolidation of our pension pots is necessary for trust in our private saving system but it is not happening because people’s pots are held up by interviews with people who are as clueless about why the pot is stuck in the pipeline as those being interviewed.

This is not to say that we don’t need to be vigilant, but dear oh dear.