“The pensions sector doesn’t need a revolution, it needs persistent, thoughtful evolution.”
On 6 March 2025, our CEO Liam McGrath had the honour of speaking at the Professional Pensions Admin & Data Forum alongside Andy Whitelaw, Head of Member Services at Brightwell and Girish Menezes, Partner & Head of Administration at Isio and Pensions Administration Standards Association (PASA) Board Director. The session was hosted by Professional Pensions News Editor, Holly Roach.
Titled ‘Admin Under Strain’, the panel highlighted an obvious, stark truth — Investment in tech adoption is a must.
Girish pointed out that schemes need to “bite the bullet” and accept investment as a strategic imperative that directly impacts productivity and member experience.
Girish stressed:
“We can talk a lot about the digital revolution, artificial intelligence and things like that, but quite frankly, regardless of whatever the technology providers and administrators are able to do we can’t actually do any of it until we get the trustees support to have crystal clear benefit specifications and clean data. Without those two at the foundation, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Andy insisted:
We need to convince people that there’s a lot of exciting work to do if we’re to attract talent and future-proof the industry. With an investment from the schemes or TPA’s, you can run an academy programme as we do at Brightwell — we invite people from any background, without any experience or knowing anything about pensions, and take them through a 9 to 12-month programme. They come out as fully skilled administrators, which adds huge value for us and our members.”
Liam emphasised:
“The future of pension administration belongs to those brave enough to INVEST, patient enough to ITERATE, and bold enough to INNOVATE.”
Key commentary:
Investment in Administration and Service Quality
- Questioning if current contract SLAs drive the right behaviours from administrators, suggesting a shift towards service quality over time-based metrics.
- Highlighting the importance of training staff and using technology to gather feedback from members to improve service quality.
- Stressing the importance of member experience across all phases of pension management and the need for the right scheme-specific platform to deliver this experience.
Trustee and Sponsor Investment in Administration
- Asking how trustees and sponsors can be encouraged to invest in administration and calling for alignment across all stakeholders.
- Emphasising that without trustee support administrators cannot implement a digital transformation or value-led AI, emphasising the need for clear benefit specifications and clean data as a foundation.
- Comparing pension scheme and member expectations to banking services, suggesting that pensions should meet the same standards of accuracy and timeliness.
- Calling for honesty about current service delivery and advocating for regulation if necessary to drive improvements.
Digital Transformation and Collaboration Among Schemes
- Suggesting a focus on digitising one process at a time to build an investment case.
- Emphasising the importance of collaboration among smaller schemes to share best practices and achieve efficiencies and scalable plans.
- Noting that the industry is poor at collaboration and challenging that consultancies can keep schemes apart for commercial gain.
- Suggesting that smaller schemes can build a business case for automation and productivity improvements by sharing data quality management processes.
Data Cleansing and Long-Term Investment
- Asking how best to educate clients on the value of data cleansing.
- Outlining that data quality is crucial for long-term benefits, such as online retirement processes, and that short-term reporting periods may not capture this value.
- Identifying that poor data quality often leads to high errors and that trustees need to invest in clear benefit specifications and data cleanliness.
- Specifying the importance of fixing data and implementing processes to maintain quality over time.
Challenges for Small Schemes
- Asking how small schemes can prioritise project work.
- Highlighting that small schemes often have significant assets and should invest in data quality to make administration easier.
- Suggesting that smaller schemes can make their voices heard and collaborate to achieve efficiencies and upgrades.
- Outlining the need for technology upgrades and the potential for grouping smaller schemes to build a business case for investment.
Positive Investment in Technology
- Discussing the investments being made in technology, such as cloud hosting and configurable workflows, to improve administration.
- Emphasising the need for platforms to be self-serve, highly configurable, scalable and able to integrate with new tools like AI.
- Calling for schemes to share best practices and the role PASA can play in digital transformation and improvement journeys.
Attracting Talent to the Pensions Industry
- Asking how we can attract talent to the pensions industry.
- Noting the difficulty of transferring knowledge between schemes and the need for training programs like Brightwell’s Pensions Academy.
- Highlighting the importance of offering high-quality systems and support to attract and retain talented administrators.
PASA’s Role in Driving Digital Excellence
- Highlighting its ongoing efforts to create working groups and education programs.
- Offering research, knowledge sharing and practical support.
- Facilitating collaboration opportunities for smaller schemes and bringing trustees together.
- Developing supportive frameworks and best practice guides.
- Driving regulatory engagement and industry standards development.
- Supporting professional development and training,
Actionable Checklist for Digital Transformation
Strategic Assessment
☐ Evaluate the current administration model and service quality.
☐ Review existing service level agreements (SLAs).
☐ Assess member experience across the pension lifecycle.
☐ Identify technology and data management gaps.
Trustee and Sponsor Engagement
☐ Build a business case for administration investment.
☐ Educate leadership on long-term benefits of transformation.
☐ Align administration strategy with organisational goals.
☐ Establish regular technology and service reviews.
Data Quality Initiatives
☐ Conduct a comprehensive data cleansing audit.
☐ Clarify and document benefit specifications.
☐ Establish ongoing data maintenance processes.
☐ Create a data quality monitoring framework.
Technology Transformation
☐ Assess current administration platform capabilities.
☐ Explore cloud-based, configurable workflow solutions.
☐ Investigate AI and digital integration opportunities.
☐ Develop technology upgrade roadmap.
☐ Demand more consultation and business analysis from providers.
Collaboration Strategy
☐ Identify potential schemes to collaborate with.
☐ Establish best practice sharing mechanisms.
☐ Consider consolidation or shared service options.
☐ Join industry working groups/forums.
Talent Development
☐ Create an administrator training and development program.
☐ Design clear career progression pathways.
☐ Invest in technological skills training.
☐ Develop a recruitment strategy targeting tech-savvy candidates.
Operational Efficiency and Future-Proofing
☐ Develop an adaptable and scalable administration infrastructure.
☐ Map current administrative workflows and identify performance gaps.
☐ Define automation and productivity improvement opportunities.
☐ Implement performance metrics beyond traditional SLAs.
☐ Create member experience feedback mechanisms.
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