January 2022

UK. Pension professionals demand dashboards and climate action

Pensions dashboards and climate change action ranked as the joint top priority for Society of Pension Professionals members, according to a new survey. The SPP’s survey, which polled around 7,000 pension professionals, questioned members on where they wanted the government and regulators to focus their energies over the next 12 months and the next three to five years. Almost a third of members placed the dashboards rollout as their top choice for the coming year, with 61 per cent of members...

Pensions dashboards should have interactive features, says ABI

Pensions dashboards should have interactive features to meet younger people’s digital needs, according to the Association of British Insurers (ABI). The ABI commissioned research which found that seven in 10 working people would like dashboards to be interactive. The industry has been working on dashboards which will allow people to see all their pensions in one place for several years. Younger people were more likely than those of retirement age to want options which are not just “read-only”, including using modelling tools...

Lean Advice for New Investors

By Jarrod Wilcox, Zvi Bodie, & Dan di Bartolomeo As defined benefit pensions have been replaced by investor-directed defined contribution plans, implementing sound investment policies for retail investors of modest means has become a problem of increasing urgency. This group comprises most of the investor population across all countries. In the U.S. it is characterized by inadequate saving, failure to take advantage of materially higher payout for delayed Social Security benefits, extensive credit card debt, and pursuit of naïve investment...

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 616 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...