The importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Analytics and Big Data in helping business drive transformation and customer management has attracted the attention of Pension Fund Administrators(PFAs) and players in the pension industry.

According them, these have a key role to play in shaping how industries evolve, and has become a massive force driving the transformation of all businesses in today’s world.

With this in mind the Pension Fund Operators Association of Nigeria (PenOp) recently put together a seminar for the industry to educate and show the benefits of adopting AI and data analytics. The seminar was tagged: “What has Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data got to do with Pensions?’’

The online session, which was open to pension professionals sought to answer questions such as: What does AI have to do with the pension industry? Can big data help the industry make better investment decisions? All of these and more were discussed at PenOp’s recent knowledge sharing session.

The session, which had over 200 pension professionals of various levels was facilitated by Jania Okwechime, a partner at Deloitte’s Risk Advisory division and the West Africa Data Analytics Leader. She assists organizations with their Data and Analytics transformation journey to enable data driven decision making throughout the organization.

To start, participants were introduced to what Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence is really about. A key takeaway of the seminar was the main aim of data analytics as it applies to statistical analysis and technologies on data to find trends and solve problem.

The session delved into how we all interact with AI in our daily lives. i.e., through the use of biometrics, data recapturing, face ID and so on.

It also highlighted some of the major benefits of leveraging Data Analytics & AI in the pension industry, from decreased cycle time, which leads to faster execution to improved accuracy, detailed data capture, flexibility, & scalability, improved productivity and reduced operational costs.

The session reassured participants that AI is not here to take their jobs, rather it’s here to help with productivity.

The participants also learnt that AI could help investment managers evaluate a wider set of data & evaluate them without going through manual stress. In addition, it could be used in the pension industry in the area of data recapturing, chatbots, investment portfolio analysis, customer complaint tracker, customer 360, fraud detection and so on.

This session was part of PenOp’s monthly knowledge session. The session is a forum that enables operators in the pension industry to network; share ideas and listen to subject matter experts discuss topical and relative issues.

Pension Fund Operators Association of Nigeria (PenOp) is an independent, non-governmental, non-political and non-profit making body.

PenOp was established to promote the operations of the pension industry, provide for self-regulation and ensure that international best practices relating to the industry are observed by the operators registered in Nigeria. It is the umbrella association for all the Licensed Pension Fund Custodians, Pension Fund Administrators and Closed Pension Fund Administrators (PFCs, PFAs and CPFAs) operating in Nigeria.

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