Oliver Lane
For those (like me) who could not get to join the Pension PlayPen’s coffee morning yesterday (Tuesday), here is the video of what Oliver Lane is up to monitoring pension technology with Radar.
Necessarily Radar’s “10 leading pension providers” is influenced by the noise of the market , rather than their importance of providers to savers.
So this service is rather more relevant to the pensions industry than pensioners.
Gallantly, Oliver presses on through a barrage of comment on chat to launch the Innovation Leader-board
The feedback to members of these schemes on these updates , appears to be less apparent than to the pension industry. Alan Chaplin and Steve Goddard pointed out that the innovation appears to be confined to parts of the product range – the experience is selective.
What quickly becomes clear, as the presentation goes on , is that technological innovation is more a matter of market rather than consumer perception, reinforcing a perception by sceptics that technology for technology’s sake does not necessarily correlate with the member experience.
The noise v impact question is one that reoccurs throughout the hour and the debate with those on the call is intense.
How is technology being used to help people get more value for money? How can technology help people spend their savings in a way that can be described as a “pension”.
Or have we abandoned the idea of pensions in return for a technology enabled wealth management system?
These questions were being asked yesterday but whether there are easy answers is another matter.
What is for sure is that VFM needs a better way of defining what is good and what is not by way of the member experience , need a quantitative and qualitative service of which Behind Logins’s Radar service may be the germ.
Thanks to Oliver for introducing us to his service. We need more of him and more of the engagement we got on this call.
I did manage to attend yesterday’s session but with a few interruptions.
Oliver was very much comparing “innovation” in the pension providers with other financial service providers such as banks. The main difference that I was not sure was brought out sufficiently clearly was with the other financial products the individual to whom the innovation is directed is the customer. In pension pot accumulation, the customers are very rarely the individuals – in 95% of cases the pension provider is chosen by the employer under auto-enrolment and do not review that decision. Employers therefore made that decision once and there are considerable obstacles in switching provider (whether to one that offers more innovation or not). In the decumulation market place – again the fundamental decision (to go for an annuity, drawdown, or even a DB pension!) is again only made once and once made you cannot switch providers.
On a personal basis, I have taken a decision to increase the number of my pension pots to de consolidate to give me separate pools of assets that I can use in different ways to meet my needs as they develop in my even older age. I am frustrated that it appears impossible to do a partial transfer out of one pot into a product that was not around when I contributed to the original product.