The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals ……………………………………………………………Policy News Journal
The £1.66bn Berkshire scheme said its decision to implement Aquila Heywood’s i-Connect software in February 2016 was driven by difficulties obtaining timely and accurate member data from employers.
Steve Lyon, responsible for technical analysis at the scheme said that the Berkshire Pension Fund highlighted that a regular, electronic transfer of pension data would be essential for future efficient pension administration, increasing quality of data held and reducing the number of errors and queries.
System providers Aquila Heywood said that improving efficiency was a particularly pressing need for public sector schemes.
“The introduction of [career average revalued earnings] for public service pensions schemes, aligned with the growth of employer volumes, has significantly increased the pension administration burden on both the pension schemes’ administrating authorities and participating employers”, said Mark Lecompte, director of customer relationships at the company.
“In addition, the requirement for more real-time data exchange, accuracy and reporting has compounded the challenge.”
Industry concerns around data protection in pensions have been growing for some time, with Lesley Titcomb, chief executive of the Pensions Regulator, warning schemes to include cyber security among their key risks in September last year: “It is trustees who are the data controllers under the data protection act, so it is the trustees who must make sure they have all the proper protocols and policies in place, and that any third parties they use also have the appropriate controls in place.”
Automated data exchanges should boost the overall security of pension schemes against cyber attacks, as Daniel Taylor, director at administration specialist Trafalgar House, explained:
“Many employer administrator data exchanges still rely on passing data back and forth via email, which is an inherently insecure method that can easily be intercepted…
I’ve seen manual data exchange, validation and upload processes take up to two weeks to complete, and the same process that is delivered through an automated employer data exchange take less than an hour – delivering better results and a more secure data flow.”
Read the full report from Pensions Expert .
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Treasure hunt for UK’s lost pensions 13 January 2017
Aviva is in talks with LinkedIn about a partnership that could help millions of savers to locate forgotten pension pots.
An article from The Times states that the British insurer Aviva UK digital is piloting schemes with LinkedIn, the online networking website and other companies with large numbers of digital users, to create an easy way for people to trace pensions that they have built up with previous employers.
Chris Wei, global chairman of Aviva UK digital, said that in 2017, “we’d like to partner with LinkedIn to create a scheme which could be called the UK’s biggest treasure hunt”.
Aviva found from a survey in December 2016 of 10,000 people that almost one in eight has at least one pension that they have lost track of, equal to 2.5 million pension policies. The difficulties are pronounced for former employees of companies that change their name or are taken over, or if the individuals themselves switch job several times or move to new addresses and so no longer receive information about old pension plans. According to government figures, there is an estimated £400 million in unclaimed pension savings nationally. People will have an average of 11 different jobs in their lifetimes, which could mean that they have 11 different pension pots, the government has found. Failing to tap unused money is particularly serious as almost three in five adults are worried about not having enough to last them in retirement, the Aviva research found.
The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals
Policy News Journal
cipp.org.uk
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