Is ‘administration’ an unhelpful phrase? The dictionary sets out broad activities but the
pensions industry often sees it as ‘low level’ bureaucratic activity.

I think a better term would be ‘pensions delivery infrastructure’ as without admin, everything else fails.

It’s the area that receives data, calculates and ultimately pays benefits. It’s the only area which deals with members every day.

With the increasing sophistication of systems and transactional web interfaces, data/instructions are received from members/employers and translated into financial transactions – it’s an important infrastructure indeed.

For current developments such as liability management exercises, pensions dashboards
and whatever comes out of ‘pot follows member’ or ‘pot for life’ proposals, it’s the infrastructure that will determine whether they succeed or not.

A great example is liability management exercises. The strategic driver to control liability will succeed or fail based on the administrator’s capacity to support the deal.

Great amounts of money are spent on consulting activities to establish viability, investment considerations and monetary transition, but is the same attention and resource paid to the infrastructure to make the deal a reality?

Sadly I would argue not. This approach needs to change if the important things which need to be delivered can be realised.

The Pensions Administration Standards Association (Pasa) has played a strong role in lifting the profile of the administration function and continues to do so, but we’re not there yet…

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