It’s fifty years since it became illegal to pay women less than their male counterparts, yet the gender pay gap means women are still paid 15.5% less than men. What’s really worrying is the gap gets even wider when women reach retirement, with an even greater difference in the gender pension gap.
What benefits could be realised by further diversifying trustee boards and other governance bodies in pensions (eg. IGCs)? What steps can be taken by the next generation of pensions professionals and the industry as a whole to improve diversity in this area?
Data could save you millions providing you invest time and money, it really could
Trustee boards and their advisers often love to recount stories about the reduction in liabilities worth millions which they achieved as a result of projects undertaken when working through their long-term strategies. When hearing these tales, I often wonder how many can also recall how their data impacted this success?
When I first entered the pensions industry, scheme data was offline and comprised of annual summaries of benefit statements sent to members; mainly actives and some past members if they were lucky. This was the domain of the (often bearded) computer department who managed a mainframe computer in a temperature controlled room.
When is a match not a match? – the pensions dashboards data headache
Accessing data via a pensions dashboard sounds simple. You supply your name and personal details, this goes off to every pension scheme, and back comes all your pensions information. Unfortunately, pension records may be inaccurate or incomplete. And the government’s proposed response – to let schemes decide for themselves how much of a match is ‘good enough’ – risks causing chaos.
The true scale of the amount lost to pension scams, and the number of victims, is likely to be much higher as victims often don’t realise they have been tricked until many years later. Nicola Parish calls on pension schemes to step up their reporting on scams - warning that a clear understanding of the size of the problem and good quality intelligence is crucial to beating the scourge of scammers.
