Chris Connelly
Propositions and Solutions Director
For every conversation I have had this year in full support of Dashboards, I’ve sadly had just as many saying, “…but not yet – I’m busy with …” [tick as appropriate].
☐ 󠄂Increased homeworking 󠄂
☐ Redundancy exercises 󠄂
☐ GMPs
☐ Scheme changes 󠄂
☐ Derisking 󠄂
☐ Scheme closure/consolidation 󠄂
☐ Small pots 󠄂
☐ Cost and charges transparency 󠄂
☐ Ethical or sustainable investments 󠄂
☐ Increased demand for efficiency, or member engagement
☑ All of the above…
…and whilst it’s true that there is a lot on, it’s time to shift the angle of attack. Stop treating data as a project and treat it as the lifeblood of your business. None of the excuses given above are barriers to “getting data clean”. I choose to Stay Positive: they are all the enablers to writing the business case to invest in data.
There’s gonna come a time when the true scene leaders, Forget where they differ and get big picture…
The big picture for Pensions Dashboards
Dashboards are going to bring a legislative imperative to provide data electronically to your members. Is that another compliance headache, or an opportunity to give your members the service they want, wherever they want?
Dashboards are going to change how long-lost members find you. But are they going to find you in a new shiny online experience, escorted gracefully to your door, only to be put back into a paper process?
Work smarter, not harder
Is getting beach body dashboard ready really a different project? Doesn’t your GMP project need clean benefit data and changes to your calculation routines? Don’t your communications exercises and desires to engage more online rely on clean personal and contact data to be effective? Don’t any of your initiatives to automate processes already flounder due to poor data? …and yet the mindset is still the same. Get through this project. Then get through the next one. Each case, in isolation, difficult to justify long term investments in the rocket fuel itself, but taken as a whole… suddenly every project becomes easier to address, quicker to deliver, greater benefits properly realised…
So my wish for a better 2021 is that we all start to respect the data. Use dashboards as a springboard to getting our respective houses in order AND change the way we keep them in order. For those schemes who have done little online to date, being visible on dashboards, 24/7, to members you’ve barely come into contact with before may catch you in the headlights. Increased pension awareness, partly championed by the latest Pensions Bill’s focus on greener investing, partly championed by campaigns such as Make My Money Matter, and then magnified by the Dashboard Programme will only increase demand for information, and in more detail than before.
If charity starts at home, then revolution starts in our databases, and our interfaces. We can make a positive change to our industry by caring more for our data. But we cannot just do it once. We have to get positive about data and then Stay Positive.
Cause it's one thing to start with a positive jam, and it's another thing to see it all through