With more than 25 years in the occupational pensions business behind him, Karl O Meara has seen how much people struggle to stay on top of their pensions. This prompted him to develop Pensions Vault, an interactive dashboard that allows policyholders to keep all their pensions-related documentation together in one place.
“The average person may have multiple jobs over their lifetime, so keeping track of old pensions can be complicated and can result in pension money going unclaimed. There is an estimated €600 million in unclaimed pension money in Ireland as individuals move from one employer to another, losing records along the way,” says O Meara, an accountant by profession and the founder in 2022 of financial advisory software company Centric Pensions.
During his career, O Meara spent seven years working in the advanced pensions market in Australia and was impressed by the straightforward pensions management system operating there. He is aiming to do something similar in Ireland (and ultimately in overseas markets) with Pensions Vault, which will be launched in April.
O Meara used the Covid lockdown to develop Pensions Vault and investment in the business to date is about €50,000 – a mix of personal funding and support from the New Frontiers programme at TU Tallaght. The company has also been approved for €100,000 in pre-seed funding by Enterprise Ireland.
Cloud-based Pensions Vault is aimed at the financial adviser community. Once an adviser signs up for the system, they can offer it as a service (with their own branding) to their clients. The adviser can upload the client’s pensions documentation or the client can do it themselves. In addition to providing a safe place for documentation, the system also provides projected pension values which users can discuss with their respective financial advisers.
“Advisers may do a manual review for a client, but it is not digital or dynamic and cannot be updated by the client,” O Meara says. “Pensions Vault provides users with a secure place to manage their pensions but also to view all their pension projections together so they can see their future in a single view.
“Also, being connected to their adviser year-round means advisers can update their clients’ portals with details on end-of-tax-year opportunities to make additional contributions. From the adviser’s point of view, the system transforms communication with online document sharing, task management and messaging.”
Advisers will pay for Pensions Vault on a software-as-a-service basis. If a client moves to a new adviser who is also using Pensions Vault they can transfer. If their new adviser is not using the system, they can still access their historical data but there will be no new updates.
“I started my pensions career in 1996 with one of the big pension providers in Dublin and, at that time, customers received an annual statement with details of their pension and got a statement for every pension they held across all pension providers,” O Meara says. “Fast forward 27 years and customers get exactly the same thing. Yes, the pension providers now offer online access but with multiple logins, different sets of financial projections and an ocean of different documents, customer confusion remains.”
O Meara adds that technology has largely passed the pensions industry by and this is a niche he hopes Centric Pensions can fill as the business develops.
“European open banking legislation was a payment directive giving individuals the ability to access their banking data through innovative third-party financial services providers such as budgeting platforms and cash management tools, thereby helping them to understand their finances way beyond their dated bank statements,” he says. “The pensions industry in Ireland needs something similar – ‘open banking’ for pensions. I believe users need a better pension experience, beyond the sea of annual benefit statements, to help them engage and understand their retirement better.”
