Trafalgar House Pensions Administration is twenty years old this year. Anniversaries tend to produce a particular kind of article, all timelines and milestones, and I'd rather not write that one. What interests me more is how much the job itself has changed.

When this business started, pensions administration was widely seen as record keeping with a calculation engine bolted on. A-Day had just landed and most of us were still working out what simplification meant in practice, which turned out to be not very much. Members got a statement once a year and mostly filed it unread. Administration was something people thought about seriously only when it went wrong.

We began by running one scheme properly, and we learned the trade from the inside, as a scheme rather than a supplier. I think that shaped us more than anything since.

Look at what's been layered on over twenty years. Auto-enrolment. Freedom and choice. Transfer scam protections that turned a routine payment into a governance exercise. GMP equalisation, which is less a project than a decade. The general code. Cyber resilience moving from an IT concern to a trustee agenda item. Dashboards, with a connection deadline of 31 October. Now the Pension Schemes Act 2026 and surplus release.

Each arrived with its own deadline and its own assumption that administrators would simply absorb it. Mostly we did. I'm proud of that and slightly uneasy about it, because absorbing change quietly is how administration ended up overlooked for so long. The industry got very good at making difficult things look routine.

Members changed too. Our Trust and Confidence Index has tracked public sentiment for six years. In 2021 trust in the pensions industry sat at 4.63 out of ten. This year it's 5.32. Better, though nobody should be putting that on a poster. The more telling finding is what people say builds trust. A quarter now pick accurate information as the single most important factor, up from around 16 per cent the year before. Not an app. Not a portal. Accuracy.

That's encouraging for administrators, and it's also a warning. Accuracy is the job. When it slips, we don't just create a complaint, we take something out of the system that's very hard to put back.

The capability now expected of a good administrator would have been unrecognisable in 2006. Data that stands up to dashboards and endgame scrutiny. Cyber controls that hold up to real testing rather than a questionnaire. Automation that copes with messy, historic benefit structures. Member channels that behave like the rest of someone's digital life. And AI that's properly governed, because the Regulator made clear in May that trustees stay accountable for outcomes whatever technology sits underneath.

That's why the market has consolidated, and why it will keep doing so. We joined Isio in August for much the same reason.

But bigger doesn't automatically mean better. Trustees have seen schemes become a line on a platform, teams pooled into functions, and the person who knew the scheme's odd 1994 augmentation suddenly somewhere in a queue. The model that works, I think, is strength behind and proximity in front. Shared investment in data, security and automation. Named teams who know their schemes and own the outcome rather than a stage of a workflow. The machinery should be invisible. The people should be what trustees and members notice.

Run-on changes the shape of the work. A scheme running on for fifteen or twenty years, perhaps releasing surplus along the way, needs administration built for the long haul rather than tidied up for a transaction. The buyout wave made data quality urgent. Run-on makes it permanent.

Automation will earn its keep where it's least glamorous. Everyone wants to talk about member-facing AI. The real value sits in reconciliation, case triage, data validation and checking, the unglamorous middle of a case where errors actually happen. Used well, it gives people more time for the cases that need a human. Used badly, it scales mistakes.

And administration keeps moving up the agenda. Slowly, but it's moving. The schemes making the best decisions treat it as part of how they look after members, and ask forward-looking questions. Not just how did last quarter go, but what does good look like in five years, and are we heading there.

Twenty years in, that's the conversation I'd most like to be having.

The fundamentals haven't changed. A pension is a promise, and a promise is only worth the accuracy and care with which it's kept. Everything else is machinery.

Garry Wake, Managing Director – Trafalgar House