Lewis Drew, the UK’s youngest ever accredited pension trustee, has urged the industry to embrace technology in order to catch up with other financial services sectors.
Drew joined Dalriada Trustees in 2020 and became accredited with the Association of Professional Pension Trustees at the age of 23 in March this year.
Speaking to Pensions Expert, Drew said that the pensions industry was lagging behind other sectors on technology. Greater age diversity on trustee boards would help the industry make more developments in this area, he suggested.
The pensions industry seems to have lagged so much to other financial sectors in terms of embracing technology
Lewis Drew, Dalriada Trustees
Currently, the APPT has 360 accredited professional pension trustees in the 2021-22 period. Of these trustees, 52 per cent are new members that have joined the APPT after the launch of the accreditation initiative in April 2020.
The APPT membership gender split is 62 per cent male and 38 per cent female.
The Pensions Management Institute, meanwhile, runs its own accreditation scheme that has accredited 99 trustees, split across professional trustee accreditation and lay trustee accreditation.
Starting at a smaller company
Drew left school in 2016. Opting not to take up an offer to study chemistry with business management at Loughborough University, he instead started his career as a pensions administrator at a Midlands-based consultancy. 
Here, he worked as the lead administrator for a number of defined benefit, defined contribution and hybrid pension schemes, and also took the role of scheme secretary for a host of trustee boards. He then joined Dalriada in 2020.
Drew’s accreditation process involved two exams and five years’ work experience. He is now taking on qualifications with the PMI, where he is working towards completing its advanced diploma in retirement provision.
Working as an administrator at a smaller company helped Drew grasp “the background and the actual nuts and bolts of pension schemes”, with everything done manually.
“Now in the role I’m in, in terms of supporting trustee boards and working on sole trustee appointments and things like that, having that understanding of what decisions you make and how that may impact on the member and other things down the line is actually really helpful,” he said.
Younger trustees can help boards harness technology
Drew argued that the industry needed to do more to make use of technology. “Every consultancy firm, trustee board, has slightly different views on it, and are at different stages of the development,” he said.
“But the pensions industry seems to have lagged so much to other financial sectors in terms of embracing technology.
“If I asked my friends how much money they had in their bank, they could probably tell me… if I asked them how much money was in their pension scheme, they wouldn’t have a clue.”
Professional trustee market expected to grow and consolidate
Data crunch: The professional trustee market is expected to grow further over the next five years as up to 90 per cent of schemes make appointments, but the number of large companies is expected to almost halve, according to new research.
Drew suggested that the pensions dashboards project will help in this respect, but added that if technology had been embraced earlier on, engagement and decision-making would be better.
He said that a greater diversity in age range would help trustee boards harness the power of technology.
“The broader [the] age range you can get on trustee boards, the more representation you can get on trustee boards… those of certain generations aren’t necessarily used to everything being online and being able to access everything online,” he said.
