The experience of trying to turn a pension pot into retirement income is currently “horrible” amid a web of different, disparate systems, fintech experts have warned.

Speaking at a session on technology and digitisation at Pension Administration Standards Association (PASA) Annual Conference, WealthOS chief commercial officer, Shri Krishnansen, noted that the at-retirement experience is going to see greater focus over the coming years.

“Pension schemes are entirely designed to provide an income but, at the moment, the experience of trying to turn a pot of money into income is horrible right now,” he stated. “It’s a web of different systems, it’s slow times to get your money out.”

Krishnansen said there were often complaints that people could not access their own pension money efficiently due to the range of different systems used, a lack of straight-through processing, and a lot of manual interventions.

“These are strangely very common in an industry that should be more digital,” he continued.

“There’s some great work and some focus on improving it in the accumulation phase, but when it comes to the drawdown side of things, it’s abysmal.

“I think a lot of that is because people are trying to run marathons without getting the core physique and structure of standing right, making sure you have a solid backbone of infrastructure that’s all on a single system.”

Also speaking on the panel was Bravura solutions architect, Catherine Economides, who stated that the digital experience for pensionholders was sometimes “quite weak”.

She clarified that this experience was not felt across the board and there were some in the industry that were worse than others when it came to digitisation.

“We did a bit of research last year, and the 18-25 year olds said they would be much happier to engage with their pension if it was presented to them in a really meaningful and accessible way,” Economides said.

“We potentially need to make it more targeted for those individuals. So, instead of taking a blanket approach, maybe look at the phases. Just trying to focus a bit more on individual pensionholders could help us out in that respect.”

Bravura propositions lead, Jonathan Hawkins, added that the industry had got to a point where there is some really good technology, but also some “really shocking” technology.

He noted that, as the sector is long term by nature, technology had been built up over a long period of time.

“Data has been picked up and moved, and when you pick up and move data it’s a bit like a jigsaw, you lose little bits of it,” Hawkins noted. “So, what we’ve got is a set of systems that have built up a patchwork. We’ve built things around the outsides to make things work.

“That leaves us in this precarious position where we have things like pensions dashboards that come along, and we end up having to reinvent things, we end up having to do workarounds, we worry about our data quality.

“There’s a lot we’ve got right over the years, but we’re at an inflection point now where technology is really nipping at our heels.”

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