There is more to being a pension fund trustee than providing members with a pension, says Rory Murphy.
"I would like to thank you for having come up with this fantastic service to the members. I have spoken to friends (different pension funds) about the program and the universal reaction is; why haven't their pension funds done the same?"
The role of the pension fund trustee has, over many decades, been to secure their members' financial wellbeing in retirement. And with a handful of exceptions, they have done a pretty good job of it, with average pensioner incomes at an all-time high in relation to those of working age.
Member feedback like the above comment, however, is probably not common.
One of the biggest lessons from the events of 2020 is that there's more to "wellbeing" than just money. The Covid-19 pandemic, and the various social restrictions associated with it, have led to growing levels of anxiety, loneliness and depression. A recent University of Nottingham study of 3,000 UK adults in lockdown, for example, found 57% reported symptoms of anxiety, while 64% recorded common signs of depression.
The social dislocation resulting from the pandemic has exposed the true extent of some of our strengths and weaknesses - both as individuals, and as a broader community. Pension funds, with their millions of members, are not only an important part of that community, but are also, in a sense, mini-communities themselves.
Of course, as trustees, our primary focus has to be, as in "normal" times, our fiduciary duty to protect members' interests - financially. But these are anything but normal times, and trustees are in a unique position, through their contact with scheme members, to provide support and advice in other areas.
With that in mind, the Merchant Navy Officers Pension Fund (MNOPF) trustee board decided to explore how we might support our members more broadly in these exceptional times. We teamed up with Wellbeing People, an organisation that works to help people improve their general health and wellbeing - often through the workplace or charities. This was the first time, though, that it had worked with a pension fund.
Together, we devised a weekly webinar, which ran for thirteen weeks from early May until the end of July, offering MNOPF members the chance to dial in and engage with trained professional advisers on maintaining and improving their physical and mental health, and covering such diverse areas as nutrition, dealing with stress, coping with isolation and improving movement.
This was something of a leap in the dark. I'm not aware of any other pension scheme offering its members this kind of support. But the response has been gratifyingly positive and, I believe, more than justifies the initiative. Of around 13,000 members contacted via email, over half visited the site and around one in three accessed the webinars or the recordings subsequently posted online. Given some three quarters of our members are retirees, that level of online engagement is hugely reassuring.
And how often do trustees receive feedback from members featuring words like "brilliant", "enlightening" and "rejuvenating"? Receiving such positive comments from members provides welcome confirmation that we are making a difference; builds and improves our communications with them, and lso does wonders for the wellbeing of the trustees themselves!
It also demonstrates an important broader point. We can - I would argue should - explore ways in which pension schemes can offer wider support and benefits to their members, beyond simply delivering retirement income. The MNOPF has 23,000 members, widely dispersed both geographically and demographically. But they all have at least two things in common: they are members of our scheme and they work, or have worked, in the maritime industry.
So can we use our position to offer our members support in areas of specific relevance to them as a group? Can we potentially offer discounted rates on particular financial or retail goods or services, for example? We would not be recommending services, just negotiating prices that are better than in the High Street, and making them available to our members.
Obviously, there must be safeguards around data protection and spam. We must not risk losing the unique sense of trust that our members have in their pension scheme.
But the success of our wellbeing initiative has shown that, done properly, we can do more than be a pension provider. We can enhance members' positivity about the scheme; build better communications with our members and, above all, make a real contribution to their wider wellbeing, beyond the purely financial.
Rory Murphy is chairman of the Merchant Navy Officers Pension Fund
