As payroll is to “reward” so “administration” is to pensions, a name to file away a part of your operational world that doesn’t play much part in your strategy. That’s what I think corporate board and boards of trustees have done with payroll and admin respectively for as long as my memory lasts.

But yesterday , admin had its own conference at Convene which sits high above Bishopsgate in the City of London. No matter how much reputational damage administration has done to your brand, we all need administration and it was good to see Capita roughing it out through a bad time

Why was I attending this event?

There are two reasons.

The first to understand how pensions administration is coping with the arrival of artificial intelligence and what will be the need of administrators when administration may be outsourced to an artificial worker.

The second is to find out how advanced suppliers are to delivering the software and the service needed to run CDC scheme from 2027. I will not play shy here, this week and some friends registered a Mutual with the FCA to act as a proprietor and over the past few days and for a few months to come we will be procuring systems to deliver a new generation of DC that pays pensions rather than pots.

What did I learn?

Well I learned what I already knew but had not articulated, that women do the work and men do the selling (dressed up as strategy). That’s not quite right but there are large parts of this country (caring being another) where the hard work that men don’t want to do , is left to women- who generally get under paid.

But I learned that if you give a woman a platform and some scope to express her views, you get a really informative session and we got several, most spectacularly from Jo Causon who explained what the Insitute of Customer Service does. Why she and this institute were not central to the Government’s VFM debate, I don’t know.

What I didn’t learn!

I had lots of questions about AI and lots of questions about the perception of administration outside conferences like this one. Can AI agents have a conscience, can they learn discretion, can they manage bereavment?

I had questions that spilled over from Torsten Bell’s earlier session (coinciding with TPR’s here which I missed). The Pension Minister said there were two few good administrators, it was too hard to get to them and once you had found them it was nay on impossible to move data.

I’m not sure who and what  he was referring to, but it got a laugh at the TUC pensions conference.

Thanks to Professional Pensions

Thanks to the organisers and the sponsors and thanks to the administrators who helped me understand most things!

You can find the details here.

These events are massively important with pensions in flux from legislation and technological revolution. Few attendants  here will be in Edinburgh next week ;that is the Investment Conference, so I will carry a light for those I met anew or once again!

I learned a lot from the women who get things done!