On the go: Two-thirds of administrators identified the volume of legislative change as one of the main barriers they faced to providing a high-quality service, according to new research.
Conducted by OMB Research for the Pensions Regulator, the survey of 203 administrators showed that despite new regulations being a concern for 66 per cent of overall respondents, this number jumped to 72 per cent for in-house teams, compared with 43 per cent for third-party administrators.
The research, conducted between November 2020 and January 2021, also showed that staff recruitment, training and retention is a concern for 37 per cent of respondents, followed by system restrictions or lack of suitable technology (32 per cent).
Furthermore, two-thirds of administrators (66 per cent) agreed that recruiting skilled and experienced pensions administration personnel was a challenge, and around a third (37 per cent) felt that retaining these staff was an issue.
Nevertheless, the majority (64 per cent) believed that they were sufficiently resourced to deliver the administration services that trustees/scheme managers required.
In regards to engagement from trustees and scheme managers with administration, 43 per cent of respondents believed this has increased over the previous 12 months.
Data quality (69 per cent), guaranteed minimum pensions equalisation and rectification (63 per cent), business continuity (59 per cent) and scams (54 per cent) were the topics dominating the engagement during the past year, the research revealed.
Despite more than nine in 10 administrators using electronic systems/software to hold their active and deferred member records, around half also used non-electronic methods, typically paper records held in the office.
In relation to pensions dashboards, despite being lower on the scale of engagement from trustees and scheme managers (15 per cent), the majority of administrators are aware that schemes will be required to provide data to savers through the dashboards (73 per cent).
However, awareness was lower among small administrators, catering for schemes with fewer than 1,000 members. Thirty-nine per cent of these have never heard of the dashboards, and 23 per cent were aware of them but not the requirement to provide data to savers.
The research also showed that the main challenges administrators expected to face when preparing for the dashboards were knowing what is required (49 per cent) and software compatibility (48 per cent). These were followed by concerns around capacity (33 per cent), cost (33 per cent), data availability (25 per cent) and data accuracy (22 per cent).
There was a widespread expectation that TPR would inform administrators of the requirements (80 per cent), although many also expected to learn about this from other sources such as the Pensions Dashboards Programme (54 per cent), industry bodies (44 per cent) or the Department for Work and Pensions (30 per cent).
