When recommending pension providers to employers, advisers are focused on forward-looking metrics which will guide future performance and outcomes, but there’s also a focus on members’ engagement journey.
That was the main conclusion from a panel at the Corporate Adviser’s Master Trust and GPP Conference discussing assessing value for money, what advisers are looking for when recommending pension providers to employers and how advisers are ranking investment approaches.
Hymans Robertson partner Michael Ambery said that clients want to know what the member journey will look like and whether advisers can support them to deliver.
Ambery added: “The member engagement journey is the real key factor at the moment. It’s about engagement and how a corporate utilises a number of providers not just pension providers to facilitate engagement.
“We look at outcomes which is the future-looking projections. The next bit is what that future looks like. We should be moving towards more sustainable investment and to achieve what we need to do in sustainability we need to increase charges.
Cushion proposition director Danny Meehan highlighted that price is the predominant factor. He suggested that tech innovation could decrease costs and leave more money for investments.
Muse Advisory CEO Ian McQuade said: “People focus on the things you can measure. Everyone can focus on price because it’s very easy. Investment performance is important but it has to be real investment performance.
“The service side of things is a really tricky one. From a scheme point of view, it will be tainted by the experience. If a scheme is moving to master trust, for example, and they’re looking at the cost and service, they will be tainted by what they’ve had in the past. Did they have a poor experience?
“You can create metrics and see what it looks like but a lot more comes down to the experience and what it feels like for the schemes. That makes a lot more of a difference now in terms of driving their decisions.”
XPS Pension Group Sophia Singleton said: “Price is a factor but the real thing is an investment track record which is the outcomes piece. Then there’s the experience piece and that’s where I think some of the changes have been more recently. Retirement support is becoming more important. We have a lot of clients who have DC within DB and linkage is quite important for those clients. Having a process that links back to DB admin for tax-free cash needs to be managed carefully for members. Then there’s financial wellbeing support which is also becoming more important.”
