On the go: Defined benefit pension scheme trustees cumulatively spend 3,000 days each year monitoring processes that could be avoided by adopting a technology-led approach, new analysis shows.
According to OneDB, Willis Towers Watson’s DB scheme management service, by moving many of the traditional scheme-monitoring processes into an up-to-date online dashboard, the average scheme is expected to reduce the time required by each individual trustee by four hours each year.
At an industry level, based on there being around 1,200 DB schemes valued at between £50m and £500m, this equates to approximately 3,000 working days a year that could be saved, allowing trustees greater freedom to focus on scheme strategy, the company stated.
The aspects of the trustees’ role where technological upgrades can save the most time include gathering and assessing key monitoring statistics, analysing the feasibility of projects and valuation data, OneDB said.
Gareth Strange, head of OneDB at Willis Towers Watson, noted that “trustees fulfil a crucial role for pension schemes, but that doesn’t mean that the traditional ways of working need to stay as they have always been”.
“During the crisis, trustees are likely to have already adjusted to working from home by adopting technological solutions,” he said.
“We anticipate that this shift will cause trustees to look at where they can make better use of technology to save time, through dashboards and data tools, and perhaps move away from longer meetings to shorter and more regular updates, based on tackling specific aspects of their work.”
Mr Strange added that the analysis shows that, for a lot of schemes, “there are clear ways they can minimise wasted efforts on data and governance processes”.
“But each individual and the scheme as a whole needs to find the best ways of working to suit them and, in the end, their members,” he said.
