ABN Amro pension fund considers a perceived lack of qualified staff as one of the four main strategic risks it faces. It is increasingly hard to find experts across the board.
“It’s the case for asset management, but also for our legal and policy departments. Everywhere, we see an acute shortage of staff,” said ABN Amro’s Carla van Dooremalen.
The upcoming transition to a new pension system, which brings a lot of additional workload and has also been identified as a strategic risk, is an important factor here, according to Van Dooremalen.
“We need to prevent people from getting burned out. When pressure increases as the transition deadlines draw closer, it should not happen to us that employees can’t deal with the workload and miss deadlines. It’s possible to hire external workers to deal with these pressures, but many pension funds and their administrators face similar pressures and all draw from the same limited pool of external staff.”
The tight labour market indeed is a concern for several other pension funds too. The Netherlands’ largest pension administrator APG also flagged a staff shortage for pension transition in its 2021 annual report.
Van Dooremalen said the ABN Amro pension fund had already taken “several steps” to find the staff it needs. “We have filled a number of vacancies, but are still looking for staff in finance, IT and risk. We use our own channels including LinkedIn to find staff but have also hired a specialist recruitment agency.”
ABN Amro pension fund does its administration mostly in house, though it outsources a number of tasks including the pension administration and IT processes, meaning the €34bn fund needs more staff than similar-sized pension funds.
Despite this, it only has some 50 employees meaning it’s still a relatively small employer. This makes it harder for employees to progress, Van Dooremalen said. “However, the other side of this is that our organisation is not hierarchical and that our employees quickly get a lot of responsibility,” she added.
Outsourcing and communication
The scheme considers the outsourcing of activities as its biggest strategic risk.
“If the pension fund does not remain in control of its outsourcing processes, things could go wrong,” the fund said in its annual report.
The fourth risk mentioned is the risk that the fund doesn’t manage to inform its members sufficiently and timely.
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