Agenda item

To be presented by Sam Price, Assistant Pensions Administration Manager, Buckinghamshire Council.

S Price Assistant Pensions Administration Manager, Buckinghamshire Council, referred the report circulated with the agenda.

The following points on My Pensions Online were highlighted:

·    38% of Buckinghamshire Pension Fund members were registered to use My Pension Online. This was a 6% increase since March 2022.

·    The table on the report showed the different registration status of members, this included 52.89% of pensioner age members fully registered for the service which was encouraging.

·    For those members who were partially registered i.e had not completed the sign up process, contact would be made annually to encourage them to complete the registration process.

·    A member of the Board queried the number of people registered plus members who had opted out of the online service. It was confirmed 35.5% of pensioners were not registered and if the number of people opted out of the online service were removed, then only 83% of pensioners are able to be registered

·    The Member Liaison Officers in the pensions team were encouraging members to use the online service for responses to queries. If a member had not chosen to opt of the service, all correspondence and statements would be issued on My Pension Online.

·    A message to log online to view statements is included on all email communications and scheme employers had been notified once annual benefit statements had been issued asking them to encourage employees to use the online service.

·    It was clarified that partially registered members had begun the registration process online however, they had not verified their email address and completed the final step in the registration process. There were instances when the verification email had gone to the junk folder.

·    There was an increase of 600 pensioners who opted out of My Pensions Online, this surge occurred in April due to P60s being issued online.

·    There were on average 8600 log ins to My Pensions Online a month, with figures increasing in May and August due to annual benefit statements and P60s being issued.

·    The amount of traffic to the portal was positive each month with members able to update their own details. Members made use of the retirement benefit calculations function which resulted in less requests to the pensions team.

The following points on i-Connect were highlighted:

·    The majority of employers would be on-boarded to the system by the end of 2022-23. The largest scheme employer was on-boarded in November 2021 and the last large employer was on-boarded last month with the systems team finalising the process.

·    At the end of September 2022, 258 employers had been on-boarded and were successfully submitting data on a monthly basis.

·    A monthly reconciliation of data provided from employers via i- Connect is now in place which allows the team query any data inaccuracies

·    Scheme employers were able to upload documents to i-Connect instead of emailing them. The team were encouraging employers to use this function as it was a safer and quicker way for member data to be sent.

The chairman congratulated the team on their hard work and highlighted the benefit of more employers using i-Connect to reduce queries received by email.