She said: “I think we’re still looking forward to change.”
The next stage, she added, is the nascent pensions dashboard project from the government. Ms Vahey circumnavigated the naysayers to concentrate on the positives. Essentially a pension is quite an easy thing. She talked about the essence of pensions as “you put money in, it builds up, and at the end of the day you get money out" and said that the concept gets “muddied up with the complexity of what happens beneath the bonnet” by worrying about the “mechanics”.
Ms Vahey said: “The pensions dashboard is a rightly ambitious project.
“It’s very exciting and essentially it’s a great idea, but we can’t step away from the fact there are going to be challenges in actually getting all the information in one place and for all the types of pensions schemes."
She said that getting the data feed is what platforms are currently working on.
“There isn’t any point in the industry being overly negative about this. Let’s face it, this is a difficult thing to do, this is fiendishly difficult, because you are dealing with so many different types of organisation and so many different outlooks, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a go at doing it.”
She added: “You have to know that you’ve got to understand what you might have in the future.”
Ms Vahey said that the future is always going to be important for the industry, particularly the thorny subject of how to attract millennials, that many advisers see as sailing against the pensions savings tide.
She said: “I think [millennials] are more financially savvy and literate, I think they are more willing to be engaged with their finances and I think if we can communicate to them in the right way, then we can help them.”
As for the industry in general, Ms Vahey concluded: “It’s an oil tanker of an industry and turning it around is going to take a little bit of time. I think generally the industry is looking at ways we can talk to customers and give them this information, and I’m quite confident that this oil tanker will turn.”
Mark Banham is a freelance journalist
Rachel Vahey's career highlights
August 2016 – present
Product technical manager, Nucleus Financial
July 2011 – August 2016
Independent pensions consultant, Rachel Vahey Consulting
January 1998 – April 2011
Head of pensions development, Aegon Scottish Equitable
