Biggest threat to our pensions is ticking time | European Markets

This time final 12 months I attended a pensions convention the place technology was mentioned. What I heard shocked me.

As a reporter I’ve to stay neutral. Now we have to put in writing up what was stated, not essentially what it means.

However this week phrases I beforehand reported have come back to hang-out me: “Shocking tech leaves us in a precarious position.”

That was spoken by a pensions industry knowledgeable, earlier than the Labour authorities had been elected, so Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves can relaxation straightforward, for now.

However she would possibly wish to learn on as a result of there’s something she must know, and might do one thing about

The pensions sector has long been identified to have constructed up a ‘technical debt’. This ‘debt’ implies that it’s so caught previously it could possibly’t transfer on to issues like partaking and educating savers.

It is so busy faffing round getting issues straight that some of the actually great things, that our pensions industry is succesful of – auto enrolment being one of them, is just not getting carried out.

On the Pensions Administration Requirements Affiliation (Pasa) convention we heard that pension systems have ended up “like a jigsaw, in order that whenever you transfer it you lose little bits of information”.

One speaker stated: “We have some good tech and we have some shocking tech, but that shocking tech leaves us in a precarious position.”

Simply how precarious this might depart us is open to query however we could also be witness to what occurs when tech goes mistaken. Within the final 4 weeks a number of main banks have expertise severe outages – or ‘gone down’ on essential days of the month.

My concern is, if the tech being utilized by the banking industry can fail so simply, on a day after we all need to entry our accounts, then how protected are our pensions.

It could be the reliance on paperwork – some pension firms nonetheless use faxes (and a few of you studying this can be scratching your head at that questioning what a ‘fax’ is) – that our pensions are safer in some methods.

I actually hope so.

And yes, let’s hope that the dashboard project means our pensions industry tech is lastly dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty first century the place it belongs.