Would the Board Know?
The board meeting ended on time. The minutes were approved. The investment report was received. The audited accounts were on track for sign-off.
Across town, a retiring member was making a third visit to the administrator to resolve a contribution discrepancy.
Another had received a correctly calculated benefit statement but could not explain what the figures meant for life after employment. Her employer-supported medical cover was about to end, and she had made no provision for the transition.
A widow was still waiting for an update on her claim.
The board’s reports describe a functioning institution.
The members’ experiences reveal something the board needs to understand.
That gap brings us to the governance questions at the heart of this conversation:
Would the trustees know? How soon would they know? And what would happen once they did?
A scheme can demonstrate considerable institutional activity while members continue to experience uncertainty, delay and frustration. Recognising that gap – and ensuring it receives a meaningful response – is the work of the trustee of the future.
The Risks That Fall Between Mandates
In Conversation 5, we examined the retirement healthcare time bomb and argued that post-retirement medical funding should become an explicit consideration in scheme design.
That discussion raised a question that extends well beyond healthcare:
Who ensures that foreseeable threats to members’ retirement security receive attention before members experience their consequences?
An administrator may see the problem. An adviser may propose an option. An employer may influence what is affordable. A regulator establishes the framework.
A healthcare gap does not disappear because it sits between institutional mandates. Neither does an income shortfall, an inaccessible service or a retirement decision that a member does not understand.
The trustee board must determine what falls within its responsibilities, what requires collaboration and what deserves escalation.
The trustee of the future must be able to see the member’s journey across the boundaries of the reports presented to the board.
Trusteeship Begins with Whose Future Is at Stake
Members entrust pension arrangements with resources intended to support their future lives. That trust gives governance its purpose.
Trustees contribute judgment, strategic direction and independent challenge. They oversee how the institution operates and hold those entrusted with delivery accountable.
Management translates direction into processes, systems and daily execution. It also preserves institutional knowledge across changes in board membership.
Members contribute more than money. Their questions, complaints and participation reveal whether the arrangement works as intended.
There is a further point that deserves plain statement. Many boards bring together sponsor-nominated and member-elected trustees. That mix brings legitimacy and a valuable range of perspectives. But once a trustee takes a seat at the table, the duties of loyalty and prudence run to the members and beneficiaries as a whole – not to the constituency that made the appointment, not to the sponsor’s budget cycle and not to the convenience of a service provider.
That includes those with the weakest voice: deferred members who have changed employers, pensioners who no longer attend workplace meetings and dependants who may not know the scheme exists until they need it.
A board that drifts into daily administration weakens management accountability. A board that receives reports without sufficient challenge leaves serious weaknesses untouched.
Good trusteeship requires clear boundaries and an equally clear line of sight to member outcomes.
Attendance Must Translate into Informed Challenge
Board attendance matters. Preparation matters more than the attendance register can reveal.
Consider an administrator’s report stating that most retirement benefits were paid within the agreed service standard.
A trustee concerned with member outcomes should want to know what happened to those who were paid late. How long did they wait? What caused the delay? Were they kept informed? Did the same problem affect others? What has changed to prevent a recurrence?
The aggregate result matters. So does the experience it conceals.
When annual statements have been issued, the discussion should extend to whether members received, understood and could act on them. When complaints have been closed, the board should ask whether the underlying problems were resolved.
“The report was noted” should not become the final institutional response to a recurring member problem.
Meaningful challenge does not require trustees to know every operational detail. It requires them to recognise which details reveal a material weakness – and to insist on an adequate response.
A completed process is evidence of work performed. The board must also examine what that work achieved.
Beware the Green Dashboard
Governance professionals sometimes speak of “watermelon reporting”: green on the outside, red on the inside. Every indicator sits within tolerance, while the people the indicators are meant to describe have a very different experience.
Board reporting often relies on averages: average balances, average processing times, average satisfaction. These are useful, but they can conceal uneven experiences.
A scheme may work well for a member with uninterrupted employment, reliable internet access and complete records. Someone with contribution gaps, an unresolved identity mismatch or limited digital access may encounter a very different institution.
Trustees should therefore ask where outcomes diverge. Are members with small balances receiving useful guidance? Can older members obtain assistance without repeatedly travelling to an office? Are bereaved dependants receiving clear explanations? Do unresolved complaints cluster around a particular service, employer or group?
Culture matters here as much as data. Boards tend to receive the information their behaviour invites. If bad news is met with blame, it will arrive late and softened. If early disclosure is treated as a sign of competence, problems surface while they are still small.
Trustees can also calibrate what they read by occasionally experiencing what members experience: calling the helpline, attempting a routine portal task, or following an anonymised claim from submission to payment. The purpose is not to manage operations. It is to test whether the board pack tells the truth.
A member should not have to become an exceptional complaint before their difficulty becomes visible to the board.
Governance Should Not Wait for the Next Quarterly Board Pack
Scheduled meetings remain essential. But important risks can develop between them.
A growing claims backlog, repeated contribution mismatches or a sudden rise in complaints may warrant attention before the next reporting cycle.
This is where timely analytics and appropriately designed AI tools can strengthen oversight. A dashboard could show ageing benefit claims, unresolved contribution exceptions and recurring service failures. Predictive tools could help identify patterns associated with future delays, allowing management to investigate earlier.
Consider members approaching retirement with unresolved gaps in their contribution histories. A retrospective report records the resulting delays after they retire. An earlier alert gives management the opportunity to correct the records while those members are still working.
The governance value lies in the opportunity to prevent avoidable harm.
Continuous oversight means agreed monitoring and escalation between meetings. It does not mean trustees managing operations around the clock.
Management should handle routine exceptions. Trustees should establish which risks require escalation, who receives the alert and what response is expected.
A dashboard without a response process merely makes a problem more visible.
AI Can Support Judgment; Trustees Must Still Exercise It
AI deserves a place on the trustee agenda because it may help institutions identify patterns, organise information and respond to members more effectively. Its use also creates questions that trustees must be equipped to ask.
What data informed the output? How reliable is it? What are its limitations? Who checks it? How can an affected member obtain a human explanation or challenge a decision?
An anomaly flag is a reason to investigate. It is not proof of wrongdoing. A generated board summary must be checked against the underlying information. A retirement projection must make its assumptions and uncertainty clear.
Some improvements require straightforward automation or conventional analytics rather than AI. Trustees should expect management and providers to explain why a particular approach fits the problem.
Technology also concentrates risk. The more member data a scheme holds and connects, the greater the consequences of a breach. With data protection laws now in force across many African jurisdictions, trustees should understand the scheme’s cyber resilience and ask a simple question: what happens on the day member data is compromised – and who tells the members?
The board should be able to explain both the expected benefit and the controls around the technology it approves.
For consequential uses, that includes data protection, access controls, testing, records of decisions and a workable route to human review.
Technical sophistication cannot compensate for weak accountability.
Fragmented Data Is a Governance Concern
A member experiences one pension arrangement.
Behind that experience may sit employer payroll records, bank receipts, administrator records, investment information and several technology platforms. If those records disagree, the member experiences a missing contribution, an incorrect statement or a delayed benefit.
Trustees should therefore treat data quality as a matter of benefit integrity and institutional trust, and test it through five questions:
- Ownership: who is responsible for resolving discrepancies between systems?
- Ageing: how long do exceptions remain unresolved?
- Authority: which records are authoritative for each purpose?
- Control: how are corrections checked and documented?
- Evidence: what shows that recurring problems are declining?
Connecting systems can improve the movement of information. It does not automatically make the information accurate.
Reliable oversight requires both integration and disciplined reconciliation.
Investment Performance Must Connect to Retirement Prospects
Investment oversight remains central to trusteeship. Returns, costs, risk, diversification and liquidity deserve rigorous scrutiny. Costs in particular compound quietly: every unnecessary deduction over a working lifetime is income a member will never receive.
But the discussion should connect those decisions to the purpose of the scheme.
After reviewing investment results, can the board explain what they mean for members’ retirement prospects? Where projections indicate a shortfall, does the board understand the assumptions, the affected groups and the options within its influence?
Different scheme designs require different analysis. A defined contribution arrangement and a defined benefit arrangement do not allocate risks in the same way. Yet both require trustees to understand how the arrangement translates into benefits – and where members may be vulnerable.
A strong investment year may coexist with low accumulated balances, interrupted contributions or members approaching retirement without understanding their choices. As members near retirement, the relevant question also shifts from “What did the fund return?” to “What income can this person sustain?” – a theme we will return to in Conversation 9.
The fund’s performance and the member’s preparedness belong in the same governance conversation.
Ask Better Questions of Service Providers
Trustees do not need to perform the administrator’s work or replace specialist advisers. They need enough understanding to challenge advice and evaluate delivery.
For an administrator: which recurring error causes members the greatest difficulty, and what is being done about it?
For an investment adviser: how does the proposed strategy relate to the scheme’s obligations, member profile and liquidity needs?
For an actuary or consultant: what do the projections imply for members at different income levels, and how sensitive are they to the assumptions?
For a technology provider: how will the proposed system improve accuracy, access and resolution times, and how will those improvements be demonstrated?
For a member-education provider: what can participants understand or do after the session that they could not do before?
These questions turn procurement and oversight towards demonstrable value. They also expose service agreements that reward activity – turnaround times met, sessions delivered – without establishing whether members benefit.
Contracts should measure what members receive, not only what providers do.
Members Should Become Informed Participants
Moving members from passive participation to informed engagement has a practical implication for trustees: communication should be assessed by its usefulness.
A statement can be technically correct and difficult to understand. A seminar can be well attended while leaving important questions unanswered.
Clear projections, plain explanations and accessible assistance help members engage with their retirement arrangements. Digital assistants may support routine enquiries, provided their information is controlled and members can reach a person when necessary. Trustees should also ask who struggles to use digital services and what alternatives remain available.
Engagement should flow both ways. Member panels, pensioner forums, short surveys and a disciplined analysis of complaints can give the board a direct line to members’ concerns. A complaint is not only a service failure to be closed. It is intelligence about where the system is failing.
Member engagement becomes meaningful when people can understand their position, identify a problem and obtain help – and when the board hears what they have to say.
Make Member Outcomes a Standing Board Item
I propose a practical addition to every trustee agenda: a standing item on member outcomes and unresolved harm, informed by a concise dashboard and anonymised cases. The discussion could examine:
Benefit errors and whether affected members have received corrections.
Delayed payments, including the longest outstanding cases.
Recurring complaints and evidence that their underlying causes have been addressed.
Retirement readiness: whether members approaching retirement understand their choices and next steps.
Access barriers that prevent particular groups from using the scheme’s services.
Every significant finding should lead to a clear decision: an action, a responsible party, a deadline and evidence of completion. “Management will follow up” is insufficient when the same issue returns quarter after quarter.
Through MOCA – the Member Outcomes Compliance Audit – I propose a structured way to examine whether members receive benefits accurately, on time, clearly, fairly and with dignity.
Its seven pillars cover accuracy and benefit integrity; timeliness and predictability; clarity and member understanding; accessibility and dignity; fairness and equity; trust, voice and redress; and governance, learning and continuous improvement.
For trustees, their value lies in connecting oversight to evidence. If a complaint is closed, was the underlying problem resolved? If a portal is available, can members complete the tasks they need? If an error is corrected, has its cause been addressed across all affected records?
This discipline also strengthens continuity. When trustees change, incoming members should inherit a clear record of outstanding risks, decisions and commitments.
Members should not lose progress because the board’s composition has changed.
The Board Must Also Hold Itself Accountable
Trustees spend much of their time assessing others. The trustee of the future should apply the same rigour to the board itself.
A meaningful board evaluation asks more than whether meetings were quorate and training hours completed. It asks whether the board’s decisions changed anything for members, which concerns lingered unresolved and where the board lacked the expertise to challenge effectively.
That points to a skills matrix that reflects today’s scheme: investment and actuarial understanding, legal and risk literacy, and increasingly data, technology, cyber security and member experience. Certification and induction provide a foundation. They are a floor, not a ceiling.
It also requires honest attention to time and independence. Trusteeship is demanding work. Conflicts of interest – in provider appointments, investment decisions or relationships with the sponsor – should be declared, recorded and actively managed, not filed and forgotten.
A board that asks management for evidence of improvement should be ready to provide the same evidence about itself.
Stewardship Requires Honesty About the Limits
Trustees cannot guarantee a particular retirement lifestyle or solve every weakness in the wider economy and healthcare system. Their powers, resources and responsibilities differ across jurisdictions and scheme structures.
That makes clarity essential.
Where a board can act, it should act. Where action depends on an employer, regulator or another institution, it should establish the evidence and pursue the appropriate engagement. Where a risk remains, members deserve an understandable explanation.
Promising more than the scheme can deliver undermines trust. So does remaining silent about a material limitation that members discover only when they need support.
The Question for Your Next Meeting
Trustees can insist that material risks are understood, responsibilities are clear and member concerns receive a response. That begins with a single question at the next trustee meeting:
“Which member outcome concerns us most, how early are we detecting it, and what evidence will show that our response is working?”
Give that question time on the agenda. Assign responsibility for the response. Return to it with evidence.
Over time, this discipline can change what the board expects from its reports, its advisers and its technology. It can also change what the institution notices before a problem becomes a crisis.
The trustee of the future will still read accounts, scrutinise investments and oversee compliance. They will bring financial discipline, informed curiosity and the courage to pursue an uncomfortable finding.
And they will insist on understanding the lives all of that activity is intended to support.
When a member’s working life ends, the quality of our stewardship becomes personal.
If a member approaching retirement sat through your next trustee meeting, would they recognise their concerns in the discussion – and see decisions that could improve their future?
This is Conversation 6 of my series, Rethinking Retirement in Africa: 10 Conversations the Pension Industry Must Have.
Next: Conversation 7 – PensionTech: Why Africa Could Leapfrog the Developed World in Retirement Inclusion on 9th November 2026.
Related article: The Retirement Healthcare Time Bomb Africa Is Not Talking About Enough
