BT pension plan adopts cloud platform from Publicis Sapient

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BT Pension Scheme (BTPS), the UK’s largest private sector pension fund with assets worth £57bn (€65.9bn), has adopted a cloud-native technology platform developed by consultancy Publicis Sapient.

The platform, which has been uniquely designed for the pensions industry, claims it will help the scheme reduce costs, improve investment management information and provide growth potential, Publicis Sapient said.

The move comes as the scheme needed to modernise its legacy technology platform, while the BTPS’s investment management team was reliant on a suite of Excel-based solutions which was nearing its limits.

Publicis Sapient worked with the scheme to analyse its business from a customer perspective and defined a new digital architecture to improve user experience, reduce operational risk and provide better investment management tools.

At the same time, it created a scalable platform to meet the evolving needs of the scheme’s stakeholders, the consultancy added.

Publicis Sapient designed a new, scalable platform for the pension fund centred around a tailor-made investment management solution featuring risk calculation and liability modelling technologies and is hosted on a secure Microsoft Azure Cloud foundation, it said.

BTPS will be able to “drill down to the lowest level to analyse variances, facilitate insights into detailed risk exposure and model future ‘what if scenarios’ to better design their portfolio” Publicis Sapient said.

“The new platform has changed the way we manage data, enabling us to focus on more valued-added research and analyses,” said Kevin Samborn, chief technology officer at the fund.

“We will be able to rapidly source data from our administration platform and quickly model it in our investment platform,” he said.

Sudeepto Mukherjee, head of financial services at Publicis Sapient, added that by leveraging modern technologies, the new platform has been able to not only reduced BTPS’s operational risk but also, create an investment platform that allows the scheme to manage the assets and liabilities of its members more efficiently.