"Digital dependence is here to stay," says AHC's Peter Nicholas, but how is the pensions industry reacting to this?

"Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a digital addict."

I'm not sure how it started, I didn't mean it to happen, yet it's now so pervasive in everything I do I don't even notice it any more. Maybe it started with the brick that was my first mobile phone. Maybe my Palm Pilot played a role. Perhaps I should have realised the early warning signs when my first Blackberry was relabelled a "crack-berry". This clearly led me into temptation of the forbidden fruit, Apple. First the phone took hold, adapting and shaping my behaviour. I didn't realise that in no time at all the "phone" functionality rapidly became secondary to the "smart" functionality that continued to entice and build my habit. But I needed more, ah yes, a tablet. Not as a replacement but rather as yet another line of dependency.

My old life has drifted into the background. I remember spending hours reading the newspaper over coffee on a Saturday morning - now made redundant by the tailored news feeds at my fingertips. Family time on the couch watching TV - replaced by iPlayer and on demand video streaming to separated devices distributed on knees, tables and palms around the house. Conversation replaced by bleeps, buzzes and bells of messages and alerts. I have virtually no idea who is talking to whom at any particular time. As a family, and yes the addiction has spread rapidly to all family members, we may share the same physical space but we are increasingly digitally distant. I no longer recognise my children by their faces, I recognise them by the tops of their heads or by their social media profile.

For many it's a familiar story. The shock is the rate of change and pervasiveness of mobile digital channels. Even my Mum, nudging 80, and living in rural Tasmania, Australia, walks around her house with an iPad Air, Skyping her granddaughters in West Yorkshire. iPads didn't even exist five years ago, yet in their first 24 months they sold as many as they did Mac computers in their first 24 years. 300,000 iPads were sold on their first day of availability and just 80 days later they had sold three million. Digital dependence is here to stay.

The question for the pensions industry is how are we reacting? In my view, too slowly. If our members are living their lives through their smart phones and tablets why should we expect them to act differently when it comes to pensions? Yet we are still crawling from print to online, worrying about members access online at work - yet they are all walking around with a smartphone either in their pocket or more likely in their hand. The communication channel has changed. It is time to change with it and feed the addicts (like me) in the way we want to consume. We want personalisation, mobilisation and customisation.

If you really want your message to connect with the digitally addicted you need to turn your communications strategy upside down and start with mobile and move back through tablet, online, print etc.

Written by Peter Nicholas, managing director/CEO, AHC

peter.nicholas@ahc.com