Digital Pensions - delivering a data-driven transformation

Elizabeth Gane: Right, we are a couple of minutes past 12 o'clock so I will make a start so first of all a very warm welcome everyone, thank you for joining us for the first of this year's schemes sessions webinars on digital pensions delivering a data-driven transformation.

Before I get into the intros just a few housekeeping points from me so first of all today's session will be recorded, it will then be uploaded to our website, and you will receive a link after the session via a follow-up email to allow you to watch the recording should you want to do so.

Please do ask questions as we go through the session to ask a question please use the Q&A function which you will find at the bottom of your screen. We will try to answer as many questions as we can, we will answer those towards the end of the session and if we do not have time to answer all of the questions or if we cannot pick up your question live we will get back to you separately after the session.

We have got about an hour for today's session although we will aim to finish a little bit before the hour is up and without further ado I will just go into some brief introductions. So for those of you who do not know me I am Liz Gane, I am partner and head of pensions at Gowling.

I am joined today firstly by my colleague Ian Chapman-Curry who is a legal director in our team. So he is a pensions lawyer, he has over 20 years' experience delivering innovative solutions on cutting-edge issues and just to give you an idea his career has seen him advise on things like the creation and delivery of automatic enrolment and a particular focus on GDPR and the response to GDPR when that came out. Ian tells me that he has a strong interest in all things tech and so he is very much looking forward to advising on the digital decade.

We are also delighted to be joined today by two speakers from Scottish Widows, so first of all Claire Thomson, so Claire has over 20 years' experience working in financial services, working across retail for Lloyds Commercial Banking business and then for the last five years Claire has been working in the Scottish Widows Workplace Pensions business so as one of Scottish Widows senior product owner she leads teams who develop the digital proposition for workplace customers both on the employers side as the customer but also for the employees and part of Claire's responsibilities are about ensuring that the applications Scottish Widows use remain safe and secure but probably just as importantly are fresh, they are relevant and they are there to engage the sort of 2,000,000 or so customers who use those business services so welcome Claire.

Last but not least David Connor so David is a design leader with over 20 years' experience in financial services and he heads up the experience design function at Scottish Widows. So David's team work in partnership with the product delivery teams to create member and employer experiences across the workplace business and he is very passionate about the role that digital can play in helping people secure their long term financial future, so Claire, David thanks very much for joining us we are very much looking forward to gaining your practical insight in the session today. So without further ado I am going to hand over to Ian who is going to kick us off, thanks Ian.

Ian Chapman-Curry: Thanks Liz. So a data-driven transformation and this is about the pensions industry being on the cusp of really a transformational period which is going to see it by the end being a data-driven and largely digital delivered industry.

Now I know not everyone might be as keen on tech as I am, what I will try to do throughout this session is to make this as straightforward as possible but we have already had a question in which might be shared by other people in the audience about people who are daunted by the wave of technological change and even I get to feel slightly funny about things….some of the things that artificial intelligence can do so I understand that….and asking about what the immediate next steps are and I think joining this webinar is a fantastic immediate next step so improving your level of knowledge and understanding this is something that is going to be best tackled collaboratively because we are all going to be bounding into the dark a little bit and learning together. And it is not like the pension industry has not been doing anything with IT in digital services we have got lots of schemes that provide digital services to members whether that is a web portal or use of IT so trustee meetings being increasingly delivered via platforms like Zoom and even attending webinars rather than seminars but the scale of transformation that is going to occur over the course of the rest of this decade is going to be of a different order of magnitude.

So this is going to the be the first of what will become a series on all things digital and pensions so do not worry if we are unpacking quite a lot of material we will be going into more detail in follow-on sessions. And for today I am just going to be covering what I think are the five key developments that are driving this change so just giving you a taster of what those five forces are that are driving digital transformation.

Focusing more on pension dashboards and seeing what we can learn from the parallels with open banking and then finally just a taster around AI and pensions you cannot do anything on technology without mentioning artificial intelligence at the moment. So that is a lot to cover as Liz says we have got time for questions and we are going to have follow-up sessions and what I think is really great is having Claire and David from Scottish Widows where we can see what some of this theoretical stuff looks like in practice.

So the five key developments that are going to drive digital transformation. So the first of these is pension dashboards and this is going to be the impetus for change, it is the thing that is going to force many schemes to engage with digital by being a statutory requirement but it is also going to then be the catalyst for a lot of transformation that happens afterwards once all the systems are connected.

One of the barriers for widespread adoption of digital services in financial services industries and in pensions has been issues around online identity verification, concerns about scams, cyber-attacks, and steps that the Government and private industry are taking to have secure online identify verification will really help overcome some of those hurdles so really opening the gateway for digital services to be provided.

The third of the five forces is blockchain, blockchain is something that people have been talking about for probably about a decade it has been the next big thing. It is the technology that is behind Crypto currencies like Bitcoin, I will not go into detail, I have never heard a fully convincing explanation which really simply conveys what blockchain is but our purposes and why it is relevant to pensions is that it is going to be used for providing the nuts and bolts are things like smart contracts which are already actually being used in real estate and certain investment transactions so those could be of relevance to institutional investors.

And continuing that theme the digital pound which is the central bank Crypto currency so the Bank of England in this country working on developing and rolling out a digital version of the currency that we have in notes and coins which are relevant in pensions in terms of everything from member payments to making investments at scheme level and then sitting on top of this, alongside this, penetrating all areas of it, is artificial intelligence which is such a broad term and can be used for everything from the current buzz around generative AI which can be used potentially to power chat rooms for members of pension schemes, through to machine learning which might be useful in things like contract review and helping in due diligence and we will come onto that in a bit more detail in a moment.

So pension dashboards and this is the force that I am saying is the key impetus and then once it is in place the catalyst for change and it is the key impetus because it will be a statutory requirement so a little bit like automatic enrolment or GDPR a lot of change will come because the Government is telling us we have to do certain things and in this case it is join up and hack into the pensions dashboards ecosystem. What I think is really interesting with pension dashboards is it is not completely virgin territory, the banking sector has since 2018 had open banking and the parallels between open banking and pension dashboards are really interesting and I think they can really help us understand the role that pension dashboards is going to play in this broader transformation of the pensions industry.

So let me try and test that hypothesis why am I saying that the two have these similarities success for open banking relied on and success for pension dashboards will rely on the data clean and accurate data and this is something that is not new to people in pensions. The pensions regulator has been talking about the importance of data for a long time and we know that from our own experience having good quality and up-to-date member data is really important.

That data to be of use outside of the scheme or the specific database that it is held in has to be in a standardised data format so when that is plugged into pensions dashboard it has to be in a format that pension dashboards can read and then both open banking and pension dashboards have what is called an API which is basically the pipelines or the cables that connect all the little components, so all of the schemes with the central database or in the open banking world all of the banks and the financial services providers and the third parties. So having that standardised open platform permits all the systems to talk to each other and to share that standardised data that is hopefully clean and up-to-date and once you have all of those things in place you then have the ecosystem in place to have industry developments to have things happen in the technological space to deliver better services for members and to deliver outcomes that we probably do not even know are on the cards at the moment so a lot of the things that have emerged out of open banking have been new developments that were unanticipated back in 2018.

So just to show how open banking works and what the parallels are for what pension dashboards might be, this example we have a customer who is a customer with a bank, an established high street bank and this customer is interested in using a third party service provider. So for this example, let us just say wants to connect a credit scoring agency with her bank to get more up-to-date data over to the credit-scoring agency and hopefully boost her credit score. So what actually happens in this process? The first thing before even the customer has approached the third party, the third party will have registered with the open banking registry, so this is a close regulated eco-system and the pension dashboard is going to be exactly the same, the FCA will be regulating pension dashboards providers, so that will have to be in place before the third party is even opening themselves up to providing services.

The customer will then say that they are interested and either by using the third party's app or going online will request access to the service. That will prompt a request between the customer and the bank to validate the request and authorisation so the high level of security that happens when your bank asks you if you are going to make a payment or to do one of these opening banking transactions it usually requires a higher level of security like getting a number through to your mobile phone or putting a card into a card reader.

The third party service provider will then also contact the bank through the pipelines that we talked about and the bank will then check two things. It will check the open banking registry and it will check that it has the authorisation in place with the customer and once it is happy that those are all in place and meeting its security requirements it will send the information or provide the service that has been requested by the third party which then permits the third party to provide the service or the information directly to the customer.

So that is a simplified version of what happens with open banking. Pensions dashboards initially will be in some ways simpler because it will just be providing information about pension savings but the clear direction of travel is for that to evolve into doing more than merely providing information but also potentially providing additional things like members being able to request services or to be able to request actions.

So where does this take us in terms of pension dashboards because pensions… open banking has been with us since 2018. So all of this works on clean accurate data with the standard data format, with the open banking pipelines and with strong verification and security provisions in place, so those were the four key ingredients behind pension dashboards and they have been the key ingredients that have made open banking work in the financial services sector.

And it has been quite a transformation, so if we look at what open banking has done in six years it gives us a real flavour of both what is possible down the line with pension dashboards and the pensions industry but also the pace of change. If you think back to just before the pandemic when this was coming online to where we are now, pretty much everyone on the webinar will have accounts with the incumbent high street banks and all of them have developed their services quite rapidly over this period. You can see on the screen there just a selection of the banks and how they now display information from different services lines, different parts of businesses indeed from outside of the group business.

Another explosion have been developments for the trusted third parties, so people like Experian and Equifax, the credit scoring agencies that use real-time data to improve credit scoring. Wise, which used to be TransferWise which uses open banking to make money transfers cheaper, and Moneyhub which uses the information to nudge people into smarter decisions around saving. But the real sort of headline-grabbing changes have been on the challenge of providers. So open banking has opened the way for companies like Monzo, Starling, Revolut and Tide to become multi-billion valued banking platforms that do not have any of the overheads of the existing banks and has really seen them being able to offer services which has then in turn triggered the existing banks to offer a wider range of services.

So how far behind are we in the pensions world to all of this? Well, there are people in the pensions industry that are the new challengers that could be the names like Monzo in the future, they are all, all the ones on the screen there are companies that are doing innovative things around digital pensions. A lot of them started out of automatic enrolment and have now seen pension dashboards as the next way of building businesses and a number of the businesses there have had recent multi-hundred million valuation or have been bought by some of the large existing financial service companies.

So I think with pension dashboards we are going to see a big bang, we are going to see when it goes live speedy adoption by members because a lot of people are used to doing online banking and using open banking. There will be high levels of user expectation because of how well open banking works. There could be the challenges and competition, either incumbents rolling out new services or challenges like the organisations that are just on the screen. There could be unforeseen impacts, so a wave of cybercrime connected to the roll-out of pension dashboards has already been anticipated as being one of the potential issues during that period of time but there could be other unforeseen impacts positive or negative.

But whatever happens it is likely to be a fast pace of developments and fast pace of development just brings me to artificial intelligence and pensions and like I said at the outset this is really just setting the scene for what will follow on with further sessions focussing on this in more detail. But where does artificial intelligence fit in into the pensions industry? So some possible uses, and these are some possible uses that are already in place as well as ones that are… just being talked about.

So pension scheme sits on huge amounts of data, AI is very good at taking large amounts of data and doing analysis and crunching through data and providing some insights there. It can also potentially be used as part of actuarial calculation work or due diligence as part of transactions. Scheme investments and risk assessments, you are seeing investment managers use AI to take on board a much wider universe of financial information and be better able to provide specific investment advice.

Employer covenant strength assessments, same story, being able to take in a much wider amount of data and look at the overall strength of the employer covenant. On the more individual level you could see generative AI chatbots being used as first level for member queries and generation of engagement and communications, so natural language questions that members have being answered in normal English language before they have to be escalated to a human administrator.

Financial guidance and planning, we have already been used to robot advice in the pensions industry and this will really just take it to the next level of sophistication and although there are all the frets around data and cyber security the technology can also be a shield as well as a sword with a role in enhancing data and cyber security.

There has been a raft of identified risks, so talk around amplification of data errors, if there is error in the data that will be amplified by the AI using that data. Consumer protection concerns, if AI is abused in that way. Discrimination, especially if the data is inherently biased and it inadvertently discriminates against groups of people. The impact on competition. In the tech world obviously we are very… we see some very large companies that people are concerned about from a competition point of view and AI can really consolidate that impact. More broadly, does it have the possibility of leading to financial prices on the scale of the 2008 financial crash or even larger? And then finally, in a sort of slightly nebulous term but a real thing that people are having to deal with is this erosion of trust, disempowerment and loss of transparency basically losing the human touch if things are just automated rather than being dealt with by humans.

The next part is all… all I am going to do with the next part is sign-post what we have next week which is a whole session focussed on data and cyber security, obviously dovetails well with digital transformation, the more things are provided digitally, the more there are the risks of data and cyber security. So the slides, the messages that are in the slides here will be echoed and emphasised in next week's talk.

What I am going to do now is pass over to David and he will be showing us, he will be telling us about what this means from a customer experience point of view.

David Conner: Thank you very much Ian. I just want to say it is so amazing to be here today and thank you so much for having myself and Claire. Yeah exactly, so in this next segment what we are going to do is bring to life some of the topics and themes that Ian has explored and just talk a little bit about it also from our own perspective, so let us go onto the next slide.

The first I guess topic I want to talk a little bit about is the theme of digitising engagement and obviously I think it has been talked about a lot and recognised that there is an engagement challenge with long-term savings in the UK and from a Scottish Widows perspective that is something that we are really passionate about helping, you know, we are a purpose-led organisation. We feel that we have got a massive role to play in helping the people of the UK, helping bridge that gap and bring people closer to their long-term financial futures.

So I just want to talk a little bit thematically. I think that what is quite kind of interesting is to start with the question of why are we digitising this? And I think one of the key responses to that is that if you look across the board now in life the digital is fast becoming the number one place that people turn to, it is the channel that they go to in the first instance and there is a behavioural framework we use in our organisation called USUAL and it talks about some of the behavioural barriers that people have around any type of change and it stands for sort of people are Unaware so they did not know they could do things. They are maybe Scared, they are now, you know, they have a fear or anxiety about engaging. They are simply Unable to do so or the A is for Apathetic and finally the last barrier is around having Limited bandwidth and actually I think that digital is actually a really great leveller in that limited bandwidth for many people's lives are digital, are online, so putting your future long-term finances in a place where people spend a lot of their time and manage their lives is a really fantastic way to sort of overcome that barrier and bring people closer.

You know, people as you can see here they are looking for ease and convenience, instant access at any time on their terms and in those moment transactions. There is a stat you will see here in the bottom left hand corner which is 266,000 and that is the number of different device type combinations that our online services within Lloyds Banking Group have to be able to absorb that variety. So that is an example where maybe people using their laptop with their chosen browser or it could be a phone with a different operating system software and that number is just increasing to grow with the diversity of devices and different online platforms that people are using to engage.

I have some icons here in the bottom of like a television or Xbox controller if you will and a car and I think some people will ask 'well what has that got to do with digital engagement?' But actually we have seen people engage with our online services through their smart television, through their Xbox and also through their car. I do not know if it is… definitely not my car, it is not sophisticated enough to access my pension from it just yet but who knows, maybe the next Conner household car will have that. But yeah I think we are seeing a variety of different ways in which people are looking to engage and primarily through digital.

In terms of how we have responded as an organisation to this, I guess there are couple of key highlights. We really want to value and give people choice so we have a website or a web experience for engagement through pension. We also have a native app and for customers who have an online banking relationship with one of the retail brands of Halifax, Bank of Scotland or Lloyds Banking itself you will be able to see your pension in those eco-systems also. We are very mobile-first also and I think the kind of the principle we have is 'design for the smaller screen first' so that we have that there so that when we start to take those experiences into different places and spaces they adapt well because they were optimised for the smallest use case in the first instance. And one of the things we have really spent a lot of time [on] is investing in our platform, investing in technology to help super-power in and make sure, you know, I guess a lot of the things that users interact with on the surface there they need to be powered by things behind on the back stage that really, really helps support experience. You know, it is not a great experience if something looks great but it is a six-minute response time or there are things behind the scenes that just do not feel like they stack up. All of those things working together in concert are the experience and the platform side is really important to making that happen.

And very finally on that kind of theme of digitising engagement, a couple of areas we are looking to explore next are around reimagining the onboarding experience, so important if we have built up a lot of effort and focus to help people engage that when they do so we make that experience, we pay it off and we do so in a way that it creates that feedback to continue. And one of the ways in which we think we can help do that is through deeper personalisation and having nudges and insights baked into the experience as well but doing so in a very personal way speaking to that individual circumstance.

So that is a little bit about I guess a perspective on the engagement challenge and how we are looking to digitise that and help make steps towards bringing more people closer to the future. Claire on the next slide now is going to talk a little bit about how we are looking to keep customers safe as we do that.

Claire Thomson: Thanks David, and afternoon everyone.  So according to Money and Pension Service an average person who is scammed out of their pension loses £90,000. That is significant and, you know, in a world where we believe pension fraud is probably under-reported we saw between 2020 and 2021 a 45%25 uplift in the reporting of pension fraud. So that is why in Scottish Widows this is a really key part of everything we do in terms of building our digital journeys and I guess we also recognise that the cost of being defrauded was way beyond the financial loss. There is also a real psychological and emotional impact which is often irrecoverable and that is why we build security into our system right from routes all the way through the journeys we build, both digital and non-digital services albeit today we will focus on the digital element.

So the tactics would-be scammers use to try and get hold of people's money and pension savings are increasingly sophisticated and can catch almost anyone out if they are not careful. So we might all think we are digitally savvy but how many of you would host a big birthday celebration on social media? I know I have in the past and think about, you know, potentially someone sharing their 50th birthday party online for example. That is just a patient scammer waiting a few years until that individual then turns 55 and are eligible to access their pension savings which is a clear example of high value fraud. So the scammer profiles their chosen victim online, looks at, you know, whether their job is likely to give them a bigger pension and then gets in touch to offer them a too good to be true way to kind of get all those pension savings in something better. You know, that could be Cryptoland, it could be unregulated investment scheme, but one thing is for sure is that individual, you know, once the money is gone it is gone and any financial opportunity that looks too good to be true probably is.

So, you know, another way scammers try to defraud people is by stealing their identities, so Ian touched on this a wee bit but, you know, with criminals using fake emails, phone calls, letters, counterfeit ID, bogus websites, they all look real but that is where they access bank accounts to then get the money out. They may even take a fake driving licence which does not actually cost that much to buy on the black market and they can then kind of access that way.

So for us while we would not want to give too much away because let us face it kind of sharing our security strategy does not feel all that safe, does it, it is fair to say that tech can certainly help. So we build security in every layer of our digital experience from infrastructure right through to our application security. Starting at the start when we know we want to make a change to our digital journeys we undertake a full security assessment which considers the parts of the digital journey we would want to change and whether that is our kind of back-end infrastructure or our front end, the application layer, we are always considering, you know, where our vulnerabilities are in that.

We also do security testing before we release every set of code and we are linked into organisations who are really advanced in their knowledge of how hackers do get into the system and we engage with them in an appropriate way to test our code on a regular basis to get them to identify any weaknesses so that we can proactively strengthen our defences. Our customers, we are very fortunate our customers benefit from Scottish Widows being a part of Lloyds Banking Group with its six billion digital customer log-ins each year, and Ian's point we have invested significantly in having that strong verification and identity process. We work with experts who achieve additional levels of security for LBG app users working at around 400 different ways that your phone works so we can know it is not just about how you log in, it is how you use it, whether you are left or right handed, the angle you use it at. It combines machine learning with human experience and that is where the tech can really help us here and it captures live image capture so that we can be sure it is not a generated image.

So to put that into context a bit I went through a digital journey recently they had a very rudimentary process where they asked me to take a photo of my ID and then a photo of me holding my ID that was how they thought that they were kind of defending against scammers owing to being an image generator and in a couple of minutes I had an AI photo of someone holding a drivers licence with their photo on it so it just goes to show that you know the opportunity that is there and the importance of making sure that we are doing everything we can at every layer and every stage and using the tech as kind of you know I eluded to earlier as a defence not just that kind of sword that can catch us out.

David is going to talk now a bit about how we are bringing innovation into the digital experience and share some of our insights around that.

David: Thank you. Ian talked a little bit before about open banking so I can ….pension dashboard …. so I can maybe bring some of those topics a little bit to life also but happy to answer any questions in the chat on this topic if there is sort of deeper places to go to so what you will see on screen at the moment is an image of…. it is the NDP of the next build of our app that is coming out to members and one of the things that you will see here that front and centre of the experiences around connected finances.

We are using the word connected I guess for design in the sense that we saw a lot of in our research of this topic that you have got to very careful with words like 'adding' it gives association or connotation that you bringing things into one place so the idea that customers or members can come into our experience and make those connections to see that broader picture of their finances is really important.

So again, another good question to start off with is why are we doing that, why is that significant, and I think that what is really fascinating for us is when quite often we do research in our labs and we invite people in one of the first areas of discussion gets into how do they organise our finances and one of the things that is fascinating is it is very individual, spreadsheets come up a lot, people have their spreadsheet and it is their way of making sure they keep on top of things and quite often it is their partner as well. There is someone else in the household or family that is part of this decision making process or there is things that go into ….that come into play from other people not just the individual.

We have done a lot of ethnographic research actually where we would go out to customers' homes to have this conversation with them rather than coming into our labs and one of the things that is really fascinating and that happens often is people will show us their shoeboxes and its of old shoes of letters or pensions statements they have so this is kind of like an area where the organisation of finances and helping see that connected picture. Many people in the UK have had around seven to eight different jobs in their career and each time potentially may have had a pension so having that altogether in one place is actually really helpful around getting to that true answer of you know where am I at the moment and you know what are the steps I might need to take in order to improve that outlook. So I would really sort of focus on this connection as super-important is part of a bigger conversation, is part of a bigger mental model that customers go through but that first place is very important, what have I got, and the connection and being able to bring those products into one place is really helpful to do that.

You will see some of the statistics really fascinating so far and this is very early data I have to cover that off this is sort of two or three weeks into our release but I wanted to sort of bring something that is timely and relevant given that this has just happened with us but 40%25 of the connections were made through our services are actually for non-pension related products.

We mentioned blockchain and Crypto earlier in the chat from Ian and whilst those product types are holdings and those product categories are not available for our service at the moment. When we have been doing the testing and development of this product those are things that people have said they would be interested to add so I think where I am kind of going with this point it is a very personal and individual thing and when you ask somebody what matters to them, what are the things that they hold true relative to how they manage their finances or how they are thinking about the future is very personal and individual and I guess responsibility from Scottish Widows perspective but in organisations who are looking to help customers in this way is providing a variety and flexibility for people to tailor this in a way that is suitable for them.

We had over 3,600 connections made on our service and that was without any promotion or any big bang we just wanted to make sure that we tested and made sure that the things that we knew to be true in our development cycle proved to be true in production. But what was really fascinating also is that data did not include the ILS ecosystem of our products because they were not alive so this is just for android users which is actually a smaller demograph of our wider base so a real appetite for this and I think it is really early days still and you know the word hypothesis and it is our hypothesis that connected pictures super-important in terms of making those bigger decisions and choices around how you get to your long term outcome. We were really using the data to test and aware albeit reiterating a service based on the feedback that we receive from customers using this data.

Very quickly cover off how we responded a little bit more you know what we have chosen to do in our app is make that connected view front and centre so you will see here when you come in you will be able to see either your Scottish Widows product if you have it but if you have also made connections we heal on them straightaway as well so you are always seeing the summation of everything that you have connected with us.

We partnered with a fintech called Moneyhub to help create this view. Moneyhub have been a great partner to work with but one of the things that we have chosen to do is that this component of our experience is all done natively and it all happens in the app so it is very premium and it does not require you know the user to go to different parts of our app to get this picture they see the connected view in the home screen and then when they delve deeper they get into those details.

One of the things that we want to do is really and reaching this far now is because I think the connected picture is part one of the puzzle then the next part of that is what does this mean, what choices do I have to make now to maybe improve that outlook? So things like embedding projections into this picture and also links to the PLSA living standards to help make that connection to what this could mean in the future is super-important.

Just a final wrap up on this section in terms of things we are looking to do for future developments it is really taking this further so being able to embed this experience with the holistic spending insights and thinking about portfolio level investment analysis and performance we have given people that holistic understanding of things before they can delve deeper into each of the different categories to get the more forensic view of per product level. Claire is going to take us home now and going to finish up on some other ways in which we are looking to innovate on our experience.

Claire: Liz I am conscious that you want to open-up for a discussion so I will just take two minutes to kind of do a quick walkthrough here. So David has talked about you know a huge amount of effort and thought goes in from us to thinking differently about how we can engage our customers and we are always looking at how we can bring innovation through our experiences but we are thoughtful about where we introduce relatively new technology we want to ensure that we are not compromising customer outcomes or risking data issues and tech like AI brings significant advantages but it comes with it the risk of bias and hallucinations so we have been very particular around how we introduce this into our business. So for us at the moment certainly, it is a combination of human interaction but that human interaction being supercharged by technology that allows us to safely take steps and to test the water in this space.

So as I mentioned before we are a digital first but not a digital only business and we appreciate that there are many vulnerable customers for whom digital just does not work so tech combined with the fact we have got the biggest private data pool in the UK ensures we can build better customer experiences for that customer base.

There is real value in colleague interactions especially for complex transactions or moments of truth as we refer to them so for transactions that can be served easily we would use AI to route customers to the right place quickly so that they can do the thing they want in a way that suits their specific need with minimal hassle but in listening to the customer. What we will be able to do with AI is recognise intent and sentiment to route them correctly and I think that is a real kind of interesting way to use this technology.

We will then use the data we have got to understand the context of what has gone on with that customer and this overlaid with our deeper understanding of colleague capability ensures we serve the customer in the right way so just a quick example on this so we could be in a position where the colleague is wrapping up their call with a customer, checking if they have anymore questions and the customer might say no but if the AI coach has picked up a hesitation from the customer it would then guide the colleague through that immotive or complex conversation.

It will also ensure that any kind of mandatory regulatory scripting is covered, pick up any post-call actions and ensure that everything needs to be done to delight the customer in the way that we want to so kind of really interesting in terms of where we see that evolve and in going to and another key pillar of our strategies gamification. So for us this is a framework we are using to realise deeper levels of engagement and to influence customer behaviour change so gamifications are a tool that harnesses elements of games like reward, challenge, progress tracking to really motivate people to take action or make a decision and by making tasks and learning more enjoyable and engaging and particularly for complex concepts like pensions gamification can really help by taking those ideas in theory and making them understandable to customers which we believe will build trust and strengthen that customer relationship.

So hopefully this has given you a flavour of where we see the trends and how we are starting to use them to better engage our customers.

Liz sorry for overrunning slightly but I will hand back to you now just to kind of open-up the discussion.

Liz: Lovely, thanks very much Claire and thanks very much to all of our speakers.

We have had some questions in on the Q&A button. We have probably got time for one possibly two so I will kick off and I will just open this up to the panel and please jump in but one of the questions is:

What are the immediate next steps for trustees who feel a little bit daunted by this wave of technological change? I do not know if someone wants to kick off on that.

Ian: I mean from a legal point of view I think getting to grips with pension dashboards has got to be up there because if nothing else that is the one that has a timetable and is a statutory requirement. I said at the outset because this is a question that came in earlier and I sort of picked up on but attending these sorts of webinars and you know trustee knowledge and understanding and trying to break these things down and understand them is also a fantastic step. But if it was a real practical next step it would be ensuring it was on trustee meeting agenda and that it was being at least addressed by the scheme's third party advisors because obviously the trustees themselves are not going to be plugging in the pipework, doing the programming, maybe in some small or bespoke pension schemes but not generally speaking.

Claire: The add I would have to that Liz is we recognise you know the power of the employer in engaging customers and with their pension scheme members with their pension scheme so I think kind of yes to Ian's point really kind of getting that on the agenda and making sure that you are talking about the data and exploring the data because I think that really helps you know as we have seen kind of getting the employer engaged then ultimately has really positive impact on customer outcomes. So that we are….certainly I would suggest is a good place to start, get the conversation going thinking about those actions the employer can take to really drive that engagement with our ……you know our members and customers.

Ian: And that can also be a really fantastic resource depending on the size of the employer and the sector but having enough support. You know we saw this in a lot of the GDPR rollouts that if the trustees were working together with the employer then you have got potentially a full IT department or an HR department that is helping unpack some of these very complicated things.

Liz: Yes, thanks very much. I have probably got time just for a very very quick final question one of the questions that we have had is around sort of whether actually this could be a bad thing rather than a good thing so is there a risk that having more technology driven applications and what-have-you alienates rather than engages members of pensions schemes save as you know are we losing that human touch we have probably all been in a situation where we are through to you know helplines or we are on with chatbots and it is just very frustrating because actually all that you want to do is talk to somebody. Do you think there is a risk of alienating people rather than helping people?

Ian: I think there is certainly a risk I would point to what Claire mentioned in her last slide where the best possible outcome is where the technology is supporting and delivering better outcomes and what is the phrase, it is an amazing phrase, the delightful experience.

Claire: Delighting…..yes delivering delightful customer experiences….yes.

Ian: Further technology, I mean the ideal is that the technology is answering basic questions in a natural language way so people are not getting frustrating having to hold on a phone line which means that there is advisor time freed up or the scheme administrator time that is freed up to actually deal with the complicated ones….I would just….in terms of the technology and it is tied with the first one about things being daunted it is not getting too wrapped up in the tech speak and the technology and it is going really back to basics as to what is happening, what it is for and how it can improve what you are already doing rather than….you know you will alienate people if you force a traditional paper based scheme and you suddenly overnight it is entirely digital and nobody has got any option and it is an older demographic and they are all very confused about it. So you know the slides and the pieces that we heard from Claire and David I think sound very promising for how technology can avoid that.

Liz: Thank you. Right I probably need to move to wrap up now but thank you very much to all of our speakers I suppose from my point of view if I was thinking about the main things to take away from today, I think first of all for me just the shear amount of change that we are expecting over the next few years which has I suppose come as a bit of a surprise to me but as someone who is a bit of technophobe I guess it is interesting to hear about you know all of the protections that are in place and that will sort of benefit the public as we move forward with this.

I think number two for that if all of this is done right this is going to help member engagements, it is going to lead to more members and members of the public just generally being sort of more engaged with their pensions, taking more notice of their pension earlier on and that has got to be a good thing.

I was quite interested in the connected pensions point and part of the reason for that is my daughter had Good Morning Britain on the tele this morning and they were talking about a programme that is going to be on ITV tonight about people tracing their old pensions and they had a lady on who had suddenly found that she had thousands and thousands of pounds worth of pensions that she had forgotten about and lost because she had moved between different companies with work and what-have-you and there was a whole section on it this morning so actually I thought well the connected pensions piece is really interesting isn't it connected finances when it comes to thinking about things like that because hopefully that sort of thing will become of the past as we move forward.

Ian: Is it going to be like cash in the attic?

Liz: Yes something like that Ian.

Ian: And hunters.

Liz: And then finally I was really interested Claire in the slide on gamification of pensions because of who thought pensions could be that interesting so yes as I say thanks ever so much to all of our speakers and particularly our guest speakers for joining us today it has been really insightful and thank you very much.

Finally, just a plug for our session next week which is on cyber security where we will be joined by the former e-security specialist at Tylers UK Limited together with a couple of our internal colleagues on GDPR and all things cyber security.

Finally to all of our attendees thank you very much you will be sent a feedback form at the end of the session. I would ask you please if you have got a couple of minutes please do fill that in we appreciate all of the feedback.

Thanks very much everybody and have a great afternoon.