BISS & IBI launch uniform pension costs overview for participants
Brightlands Institute for Smart Society (BISS) and The Institutional Benchmarking Institute (IBI) is launching the Uniform Pension Costs Overview, UPKO for short. This is in response to the AFM’s call – earlier this year – to inform participants about the costs of their pension in an accessible manner. This ensures clear and consistent communication.
It is not easy to communicate the complex relationship between policy choices, costs, and performance to the participants in an understandable way. Over the past few months, Brightlands Institute for Smart Society (BISS) has worked together with The Institutional Benchmarking Institute (IBI) on a short and powerful, mainly visual overview, without pension jargon. We have called this UPKO, the Uniform Pension Costs Overview, because, like the UPO, this could be shared annually with participants for accountability.
“Certainly with a view to the new pension system, clear cost communication is important because then the pension benefit is directly related to the net return. In addition, the costs must soon be allocated per cohort and must be transparent for the participant. As a result, differences in costs also arise within the pension fund at that time. By being informed correctly and transparently now, participants in the new pension system will soon be able to assess the costs better in context,” says Eric Veldpaus, director of IBI.
Together with Prof. Dr. Lisa Brüggen – professor of financial services at Maastricht University and internationally recognized expert in pension communication – IBI and BISS have worked carefully to create UPKO. The result is a clear document that can be used as a uniform reference document for all parties. That makes communication easier.
“We were happy to participate in this initiative,” says Dr. Judith Kamalski, Managing Director BISS. “Together with IBI, we have succeeded in developing a UPKO that makes the complex matter of implementation costs clear to the participants in a visual manner with a short explanation.”
