Gita Salden, director of supervision at the Dutch regulator DNB, is not too bothered by the fact that many pension fund trustees criticise the regulator’s role during the pension transition, she said on Thursday during a press conference for the publication of DNB’s annual report.
“As a regulator, we must be strict on substance,” she said. In this regard, she considered it positive that DNB received just a meagre pass mark of 5.7 out of 10 on its role during the transition from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) arrangements from pension fund executives attending a congress organised by IPE’s sister publication Pensioen Pro.
“But on behaviour, I would like to have a somewhat better score,” Salden added.
That improvement on the latter is possible was evident from statements made by Margreet Teunissen, the president of PWRI, one of three Dutch funds that made the transition to DC on 1 January 2025.
During a panel debate with the presidents of the two other “early bird” schemes, she said: “Occasionally the process to get the transition over the line was very tense, and went in a way that we didn’t quite appreciate. This needs to be handled differently in the future.”
At the start of this year, Teunissen told Pensioen Pro she had “many very difficult discussions” with DNB in the months prior to PWRI’s transition.
The criticism from the sector that DNB received over the past year makes Salden “actually quite happy” with the 5.7-mark.
“Together, we are still involved in a learning process. If you look at the complexity of the transition, I think receiving a 5.7 gives hope for the future. I hope we can look back at a higher mark next year,” she said.
DNB introduces AI tool ChatDNB
DNB recently started using its own AI tool, dubbed ChatDNB, to help it assess the troves of documents submitted by pension funds that want to make the transition to a DC arrangement.
The tool is based on OpenAI’s language model ChatGPT.
With the deployment of AI, DNB wants to speed up the assessments of transition files. This is necessary because the speed at which files are processed needs to at least double, according to DNB’s head of pension fund supervision Jochem Dijckmeester.
“Our response time remains six months, but we are now going to talk to dozens of funds at the same time,” he said.
As of next year, 53 funds are scheduled to move to a new DC arrangement, according to a recent survey by consultancy Eraneos, compared to just three funds so far.
Supervision director Salden spoke, however, of “at least 40 funds”, ostensibly taking into account the possibility that many funds will (again) postpone their transition.
This article was first published on Pensioen Pro, IPE’s Dutch sister publication.
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