It is hard to talk about death, but some people let their feelings out in written words and share them with those they know, those they don’t , those they’d like to know. My friend Alan Chaplin wrote to me last night to say he’d got “carried away” responding to a post by Roger Higgins. I know Roger as I know Alan as being men who have deep feelings; kind people both. Here are the posts of both.
The reference to Martin Lewis is topical, he ended his show on pensions last night asking us to fill in expression of wishes forms to help those when we die.
I have to admit to not paying much attention to my pension pots; other than a nomination of the beneficiary when I die, my pots assume I never will. My DB pension goes to my partner and there is no spouse to whom my state pension will go. There’s a reason to get married!
But now to Alan and the thoughts of a man I turn to for common sense. Here he is talking to a former boss, Roger Higgins.
Sorry to hear about your dad and whilst I’m fortunate enough not to have to have dealt with this yet, it is something we as an industry seem very poor at. As for your idea of a note, my parents are that organised and I have a letter that contains details of where the wills are, bank accounts, investments, pensions etc. Problem is more likely to be me losing it rather than them not being organised.
About the only part of the process that gets positive feedback seems to be the tell us once service. That was released 2011/2 and there doesn’t seem to be have any other major changes since then.
Alison Coulson wrote a similar frustrated piece a couple of years back – https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alison-coulson-5984061_having-worked-in-the-pensions-administration-activity-7190720598023536641-QMlN/
I don’t think she’s on here but Miranda Green at FT also did a good piece setting out frustrations here https://www.ft.com/content/11defc61-3f91-4c4f-bd18-3446fac5ba35?syn-25a6b1a6=1
Alan returns to his keyboard to add this about using the infrastructure of dashboards to help those sorting the financial consequences of death.
Whilst dashboards don’t cover pensioners, I think the infrastructure could support some of the changes you suggest quite easily. In particular, the find part is “broadcast” in nature – basic details get sent to every connected pension scheme.
What is stopping us reusing that mechanism? When notified of a death, a pension scheme pops that into the dashboard find message format with a tag to say it is a death and sends to dashboard who forwards it on to every scheme.
No GDPR stopping sharing as it doesn’t apply to deceased people. Receiving schemes can then trigger their processes so at least they start at the point of first notification which would hopefully speed things up and where the survivors are unaware of a scheme, the scheme would hopefully contact them and where none known, start trying to track them down.
There are of course more consequences of dying young and with unspent pension pots; they were also were discussed by Martin Lewis last night.
For Alan, the consequences of death go beyond pensions into the dark areas of unpaid death claims from life insurance
Writing that makes me think there is no practical barrier to non-pensions organisations being added for that service e.g. life insurers. Anyone who wants to could sign up to receive those messages – need to think a bit about how to check “anyone” is legitimate but ABI keyfacts suggests less than 1,500 insurers in UK so not a big problem for that sector.
abi-ukinsuranceandlongtermsavings-keyfacts.pdf
abi.org.uk
Alan is both practical and sensitive in how he talks of these things, I hope his thoughts are read by those who can do something to ease the pain of the bereaved.
Alan Chaplin finishes his thinking here (rambling as he characteristically calls it!
Same infrastructure could be used to inform all schemes of nominee details so address the problem that of people telling current scheme but not realising they have to actively tell others. Minor GDPR issue here in that need consent to share details but that could probably be overcome by adding a tickbox to nomination forms and explaining very clearly why this is a good box to tick (maybe we need someone outside pensions to do that explaining 😉 ).
I tend to be bit blasé about changing laws but if getting people to opt in doesn’t work, then, as you say, amend GDPR/Consumer duty so sharing is a requirement. Extending the message to cater for all the different ways people may be split their benefits might be hard but I expect adding a % per nominee covers the vast majority and putting that in something which most schemes use might encourage outliers to change to that.
In any event, I expect that knowing who people are is the main objective. If/when details are required, can get from them or the scheme that received the original form. Anyway, enough rambling for now – if you can think of ways to improve it, I’d be happy to help.
