Aim’s Pension Data Service for all Public Service Schemes -

A solution for rapid understanding, data collection and planning of compliance with the McCloud ruling

 

 

The Situation

 

A ruling by the Court of Appeal in 2018 and a Treasury statement in 2019 confirmed that all public service pension schemes were age discriminatory in terms of transitional protection (the statutory underpin). This judgment has required Scheme Managers and administrators to assess which members may have been discriminated against, what service data is not held but needed to calculate underpin equivalence and the scale of the benefits due. 

Once this is known, an assessment can be made of the work to be done, pension administration resources required and budget to compensate those who were discriminated against and ensure McCloud compliance. There is a lot of work to do for all schemes to remedy affected members and be ready for the legislative changes planned for April 2022.

Estimates are that between 30-50% of members are potentially affected, with member data going back many years and residing across disparate systems and locations. Finding, organising and assessing the data will require enormous time and resource effort using traditional methods. 

 

Time is short. Action is required now!

 

The Aim Solution

 

The data challenge is significant – finding, organising and assessing the data requires an enormous time and resource effort using traditional methods. Aim addresses this challenge with its data governance tool, dataBelt^® and its AI enabled forensic search platform.

 

Aim sees the McCloud process falling into the following stages:

• Stage 1: Identify members who are in scope of McCloud;
• Stage 2: Discover relevant data from structured data sources (databases);
• Stage 3: Discover other data from unstructured sources (emails, contact centre phone recordings, files);
• Stage 4: Collect, consolidate, validate (cleanse) the required data; and
• Stage 5: Assemble the data in a suitable form and format for export to the administration team or system

 

 

Aim recognises that Stages 1 and 4 can be handled by your pensions administration team using your scheme system - although we can provide help there too. The real challenge, which is both resource intensive and time consuming, is found in Stages 2 and 3 – discovering the data from multiple different data sources in different formats and platforms that is needed to assess the underpin equivalence and to calculate the benefits due.

What do we mean by data? At Aim we have the technology and capability to search traditional data sources such as pension and payroll database systems, but all other electronic information sources such as documents, files, spreadsheets, images, and emails.

How do we do this? Well Aim’s pension data specialists use our industry leading AI-enabled forensic search and analytical platform dataBelt^® to search all data sources to discover, identify and collect all necessary service information on the members identified as being in scope of McCloud. Using industry leading, proven technology means that searches are conducted quickly and with pinpoint accuracy collecting the necessary information required in minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks through traditional manual methods saving 95% of the cost and time, accelerating delivery plans, and improving assurance as there is no risk of error or oversight.

Once data has been gathered into dataBelt^®, it can then be easily exported into your scheme system via a central area or to member records directly for processing by your pensions admin team. 

 

DataBelt^® provides a full audit trail of what has been searched and found, supported by sophisticated reports and dashboards.

 

The Results

 

In summary, the Aim data service uses advanced AI technology to discover and collect all the necessary service information on the members identified as being in scope of McCloud. This allows your pensions admin team to plan, resource and time-box the work with confidence.

The Aim data service is delivered on a fixed price basis, based simply on the number of members in a pension scheme and number of data sources to be searched.  This avoids any unpredictable costs.

 

Finding out more

 

Click here to (re)watch our webinar Taking the pain out of McCloud project.

Watch our McCloud Data Service bitesize video here. 

Watch our McCloud Data Service demo here.

 

 

 If you would like to find out more about our service or solution, please contact us at mccloud@aimltd.uk.