PASA president warns over data costs

Speaking at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association’s annual conference in Manchester on Wednesday, Margaret Snowdon called data “the one big elephant in the room” for administrators and their trustee clients.

“I don’t think that the data we use is good enough for good pensions management and I don’t think it’s good enough for dashboards,” she told attendees.

“I think we need to spend about £25m in a four-year period to get it up to scratch.”*

The comments came following the release of the pension schemes bill by the Department for Work and Pensions on Wednesday. A key feature of the bill is a proposal to require pension schemes to submit data to pensions dashboards, allowing consumers to gain an accurate view of their entire pension wealth.

“I do think we’ll see some big strides in data, either by using a carrot which I’d quite like to do, but the alternative is a big stick,” Ms Snowdon added.

Of course, this work improving the quality of data cannot be done for free.

“I’m really pleased to say a lot of progress is being made by administrators to improve member service, to improve efficiency, but it’s very hard to do that when funds are constrained,” she said.

Ms Snowdon also chairs the Pension Scams Industry Group, a body dedicated to helping trustees better defend their members from scammers.

Commenting on the rise of claims management companies to claw back lost money from scams, she said: “Schemes that don’t do due diligence are going to find themselves in a sticky place when all these claims management firms come to them.”

*A previous version of this article erroneously stated that Ms Snowdon estimated the cost of data cleansing at £25bn. In fact the cost will come to £25m.