Delegates at the Pensions Administration Standards Association (Pasa) conference in the City of London were told pensions technology was at least “10 years behind” other industries.

Paul Sturgess, director of Pasa said: “I fear that the time frame [for keeping up with available technology in other industries] has got bigger than the heady days of 2000.”

Paul Leandro, partner at Barnett Waddingham, said the industry’s “technical debt” would take a huge effort to pay back.

Jon Hawkins, principle business consultant at Bravura Solutions, said the slow uptake of tech was an issue endemic to pensions.

He said: “Pensions is a long-term industry and that has meant technology has been long-term, coming through being paper based, to microfiche and faxes and so on.”

But this meant systems have ended up “like a jigsaw, so that when you move it you lose little bits of data.”

Dashboards and pensions technology

Hawkins said the industry had learned how to move its data but with the introduction of dashboards looming more work was needed.

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

Anton Padmasiri, founder of Wealthos told delegates: “Macro-economically pensions have changed over the decades. From everyone being all but guaranteed a pension and not really having to worry about anything until they retire, to having to take an interest and significant responsibility for their retirement.”

“But industry had not changed underneath to support that shift.

“If you take tech on its own we have shifted from a mainframe to client servers and now the cloud.

“What the cloud has done is get rid of the need to have servers. Yet 99.9 per cent of all pension assets are still administered on software [server based technology].”

Hawkins said he believed the dashboard would prove a catalyst for the industry to become more consumer focused.

“People will be able to see it and it won’t be within your control. It will put things in the spotlight and give us a whole load of questions we are not even thinking of.”

Giving pension savers a meaningful experience

Hawkins believed there was capacity to give savers a pension experience that looked like Uber but the adoption curve was proving slow.

“The pensions industry needs to adopt technology so it works like all the services we use on a daily basis.”

Catherine Economides, design architect at Bravura Solutions, said the industry needed to shift its tech focus to younger savers.

She said: “A younger pension holder should be shown the effect of taking maternity leave rather than how much they need to retire.

“The industry often falls down on presenting the implications of the the long-term affects of pension saving and tech could fill that gap.”

Shri Krishnansen, chief commercial officer at Wealthos, said the pensions industry had not even started crawling when it came to evolving its technical infrastructure.

“We are not falling down, we haven’t even tried to crawl.”

He said the solution was to end the “web of disparate systems” and the need for manual intervention. “The industry is still using faxes. The industry should be more digital and the connectivity is there through open banking.”

AI, scams and pensions

The panel also discussed scams and artificial intelligence (AI).

Hawkins said the adoption of a banking model which verified everything would prevent more scams.

He said: “We can go to that model, and we automate the hell out of it.”

Krishnansen said that although generative AI had captured the imagination, there was no point in even trying to use it within pensions.

“With data sitting in so many different forms, how are you going to train AI to be meaningful if data is not all in the same place.

“We need to get the core systems right first.”