A pension transition full of opportunities

Kaya de Lange was appointed CEO of BeFrank in March 2024. She looks back on the past year and looks ahead to the opportunities for the pension sector in 2025.

Our sector has an important task. The transition to a new pensions system has begun and it is up to us, together with the advisor, to guide this process. In early 2024, I took up my position at BeFrank with great enthusiasm to work on this, together with the help of many others of course. The first employers joined us last year, with many who followed this year.

This transition is a huge opportunity as a sector to make a big step towards making pensions easier to understand, not only the schemes themselves, but also the choices that employers and participants can make. I believe that by properly organising choice guidance and through further personalisation, we can make the difference with BeFrank to really make pensions more personal. The PensioenWegwijzer 2024 Award we recently won for the Survivor’s Pension Assistance is a nice validation of our efforts.

At the same time, the sector is in constant flux. There has been a huge move towards consolidation by insurance companies and PPIs, causing the DC market to increasingly coalesce. Standing out is more relevant than ever. We consider activating participants to be key, along with ensuring sustainability. Not only in our products, but in all our operations. This year we have become a B Corp, which I am very proud of. But this is not an end goal, as we will continue to commit ourselves to what it stands for in the years ahead.

And, of course, we must also be ready for the next phase, in which scalability will be a major theme. I am curious about all the developments that can help us achieve this. We know that AI will play a major role and that the labour market will develop, but we don’t know exactly how. And we know that we will soon have a new pensions system. Together with our advisors, we have taken the first big steps and are going to do everything we can to make this transition a success.

This column was published in InFinance on 19 December