December 2021

Japan’s Lesson for the World: Robots Won’t Save Us

Japan affords a preview of what the future of the United States, Australia, and Western Europe will become unless meaningful steps are taken to ensure that a nation’s relevance is measured by how it creates lives of dignity for its citizenry. But seeing this relevance has become difficult as much of the luster has gone from Japan studies. Wistful comments about heady days during the 1980s, when scholars of Japan were in demand, are still heard. But China now...

Nigeria. PenCom says 72,000 participants registered for Micro Pension Plan

The National Pension Commission (PenCom) has disclosed that 72,000 participants have been registered under the Micro Pension Plan (MPP) as at November 2021. This was disclosed by Head, Micro Pension Department, PenCom, Mr Dowda Ahmed, in an interview on Friday with NAN during the Pension Fund Operators Association of Nigeria (PenOp) Annual Media Parley in Lagos, themes, “Micro Pension – Challenges and Opportunities.” He also pointed out the category of people under the scheme. What PenCom is saying Ahmed stated that the scheme...

How Technology Can Support Healthy Aging

As populations are aging around the world, people are spending more time in poor health. In 2019, the global average time spent in poor health was 10 years, up from 8.6 years in 2000. The COVID-19 pandemic has now exacerbated health risks for the elderly, while straining the capacity of health and care systems to cope with growing demand. This moment calls for a re-examination of how the elderly can age well: independently, well cared for and happily. Below are...

November 2021

The Future of Jobs Report 2020

By World Economic Forum The Future of Jobs report maps the jobs and skills of the future, tracking the pace of change. It aims to shed light on the pandemic-related disruptions in 2020, contextualized within a longer history of economic cycles and the expected outlook for technology adoption, jobs and skills in the next five years. Get the book here 583 views

The Skill-Specific Automatability of Aging Workers and Retirement Decisions

By Zeewan Lee Much of the discourse on the impact of automation on labor supply tends to assess the labor force as a whole, thereby disregarding the marginal effect on aging workers. In lights of the growing technological changes, we assess the linkage between the automatability of workers and retirement timing. Based on the theoretical model of task-based technological changes and drawing data from the Health and Retirement Study and O*NET, we create an Automatability Index based on workers’ primary...

October 2021

How Technology Can Save the Global Pensions Industry

Technology continues to progress and change almost every aspect of our modern lives. The pensions industry has been subject to a great deal of change due to technological innovations. Interactive portals, modelling tools and blockchain technology mean that pension funds have an overwhelming variety of technology at their disposal. This has allowed individuals a greater level of control and overview of their pensions than ever before. Since technological advancement is showing no signs of slowing down, understanding its impact on...

August 2021

How Blockchain Can Transform Retirement Planning

Retirement planning deals with massive amounts of data clusters across multiple processes. Keeping participants’ assets safe is one of the major responsibilities of plan providers to ensure customer trust. Read also Canada. Union Files Legal Challenge Over OMERS’ Early Retirement Policy Defined contribution (DC) plans such as the National Pension Scheme in India and 401(k) in the US have become mainstream, but there is no designated registry to track all the retirement plan accounts and their status on one platform. The...

June 2021

Pensions industry should use tech to sustain the savings boom

It has been a tough year for many, and experts agree that the economic fallout of 2020 has hit the self-employed particularly hard. But among the bad news stories lurks a glimmer of hope from an unexpected source: the world of private pensions. It certainly has not been smooth sailing – when Covid-19 hit, there was a sharp halt to pension contributions. New sign-ups to our own service dropped by a staggering 90 per cent in the first week of lockdown. However,...

May 2021

How Regulators Use Sex-Disaggregated Data and RegTech to Enhance Financial Inclusion

By Toronto Centre Financial inclusion of women brings disproportionate benefits to their families and to economic development, yet in many countries an access-to-finance gender gap remains. Sex-disaggregated data (SDD) is key to monitoring and addressing this problem. This study examines the role that financial services regulators can play in efforts to address financial inclusion of women: how they are using, or could use, SDD to enhance women’s access to and use of financial products and services of the right quality that...

Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology

By Tara Dawson McGuinness, Hana Schank “Worth a read for anyone who cares about making change happen.”—Barack Obama A powerful new blueprint for how governments and nonprofits can harness the power of digital technology to help solve the most serious problems of the twenty-first century As the speed and complexity of the world increases, governments and nonprofit organizations need new ways to effectively tackle the critical challenges of our time—from pandemics and global warming to social media warfare. In Power to the...