Core Competencies

We help our clients get control of their pension project, pension technology design and delivery in practical, expert ways.

Does this sound like you?

"I have a new pension technology project to deliver, but I don't have people with the right skills on my team."
"I’ve used consultants before and it was a disaster – the quality of their work was not good enough."
"I need to know that my pension tech consultant will represent my culture and standards to pensioners."
"I need a specialist pension technology consultant of the right calibre and background."
"People skills are rare in the pensions tech industries to manage my business sponsors and political stakeholders."
"I wish I had someone who could ‘translate’ between business people and software engineers..."
"I need technical and natural language content written in compelling, perfect English."

…then you’re not alone. What you actually need is the right professional who offers you:

Certainty of cost

Certainty of delivery risk; and

Certainty of quality.

We help you to:

Take control of your pension tech project;
Articulate all the requirements and specifications as good content
Get certainty of cost, risk and delivery;
De-risk the inevitable changes that crop up; and
Rely on high standards of quality and culture.

Together, we’ll focus on:

Understanding, in great detail, your project requirements;
Documenting everything the way you (or your client) wants it (e.g. Agile, Slack etc.);
Give your vision & business proposition clarity;
Design, scope and build your fintech solution as an IT architecture in a way that works first time;
Pivot, if required, during build so you can grab opportunities and manage change;
Measure your risks and de-risking your delivery with smart architectural choices; and
Achieve 100% quality and match your culture throughout.

There’s a very straightforward way to achieve this and the way forward is to debunk these three myths together and get your show on the road again:

MYTH

I don’t have the right pension tech skills in my team

Yes. Pensions technology projects are highly complex, strictly regulated and often carried out in the full glare of public engagement and political policy debate.

Pensions technology skills are specialised. Actuarial oversight, massive scale deployments and secure, transparent processes play a big part in designing and delivering pensions tech.

Don’t worry if you don’t have these skills already in your team. No-one would expect advanced pensions tech people to be hanging around, waiting for their next project to roll along…

We work with a flexible, friendly and professional team of pension tech associates. Consultancy work comes naturally to pensions tech because each project is a significant step forward in capability, meaning we move from major project to major project quite comfortably.

MYTH

Pensions technology is over-engineered

Over-engineering is always the result of confused engineers.

Why are they confused? Because they’re straightforward, STEM-type logicians who need clear requirements and testable statements from the business. It’s not too much to ask…

Most ‘over-engineering’ is the result of poorly-documented business requirements that are not written to a sufficiently detailed level for serious engineers to use.

So, we’ll work together to revisit and document where your detailed business (and technical and integration) requirements, at least for the core stuff – the cash management and the integration requirements.

“Document’ here means whatever you use – waterfall or Agile. We’ve noticed that, despite its many, many other benefits, the Agile methodology is particularly prone to failure due to poorly defined / written EPICS and use cases. The good news is that these are easy to fix.

MYTH

My pensions technology decisions are irreversible by now

Maybe they are. Most likely they’re not.

Either way, we need to look at them in private and make sure they all still stand up to scrutiny (that’s the advantage of professional, confidential outside expertise).

We’ll take the two myth-busting elements (measurement and documentation), above, and use them to go back to your key pensions technology project decisions and assess if these are now fit for purpose, for example:

Why did you pick this piece of pensions technology over the others on the shortlist?
Would you revisit that decision and why – would you have picked the same pensions tech again knowing what you do now?
What can you do now as a minimum, under control and with an eye on delivery risk and cost, to get an initial release stage up and running?
Have you always matched the pensions tech to the pension scheme/proposition, and, if not, what can you decide about that right now that’ll satisfy senior stakeholders AS WELL AS allow the work already undertaken to thrive as a project?
What are the top-three things about the pensions tech that you know NOW that would make you do something differently?
Can you change the bias of the project towards these in the near future and how?

There’s no cookie-cutter way to do this. Each pensions tech project (even each stage in a wider programme of work) is unique and has its own stresses and variables.

But we’ve used calm common sense and good documentation to help dozens of pensions tech projects to get resolved one way or another before now and we have no reason to believe your pensions tech challenge is any different.

The end result is a quality, proven pensions tech project outcome that satisfies you, your client, all stakeholders and makes you look good – and feel good too.