What pension administrators are really asking about cross-border payments

We spent a day at the PASA conference and were talking to pension administrators, TPAs and LGPS officers and the conversation almost always finds its way to the same place: the payment. Dashboards, cyber, AI, the talent pipeline, they all matter, but each of them eventually lands on a member somewhere in the world waiting for the right amount on the right day.

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We hear the same questions over and over. Below are the ones we hear most often from Heads of Pensions, Trustees, Finance and Treasury teams, Ops and Payroll leads, and the Compliance and Governance functions sitting behind them, with practical answers from the Navro team.

Q: Members keep complaining that their overseas pension arrived late, short, or both. How do we fix the trust problem?

The trust problem is a transparency problem. When a payment leaves a UK scheme on a SWIFT correspondent route, neither the administrator nor the member can see what's happening to it. Lifting fees get deducted along the way. Intermediary banks add hidden cuts. The member sees a smaller number than the payslip promised, calls the helpline, and the administrator can't always explain why.

Local payment rails change the maths. Settling in 130+ currencies across 200+ territories — with 80+ markets reachable on same‑day or real‑time rails — means fewer hops, fewer lifting fees, and a payment that lands when it's supposed to. Pair that with downloadable Proof of Payment from the Hub and the helpline conversation goes from "we'll investigate" to "here's exactly what happened." Find it, fix it, prove it — faster.

Q: With the MoneyHelper dashboard now expected in 2027, what does that mean for our payments stack?

Dashboards will surface every scheme a member belongs to, and the moment members can see their pots side by side, two things happen: queries spike, and the quality of the data and the payouts behind those queries gets scrutinised. A "possible match" is the start of a conversation that often ends with a transfer or retirement quote — and that quote needs to translate into a clean, traceable payment, often across borders.

Trustees and administrators should be asking three things of their payments provider before 2027 lands. Can you settle in the currencies and corridors where members actually live, not just the easy ones? Can you give us real-time payment status and reason codes the helpline can read out? Can you provide audit-ready reporting at scheme level, not just a quarterly statement? If the answer to any of those is "sort of," dashboards will expose it.

Q: Cyber resilience keeps getting framed as an admin problem. What about the payment rail?

The payment rail is one of the highest-value targets in the entire scheme operation. It's where money leaves, where account details sit, and where a successful incident causes the most reputational damage the fastest.

Resilience on the payment side is built in layers. Verification of Payee (VOP), Confirmation of Payee (COP) and global bank validation stop misdirected and fraudulent instructions before they're sent. Ongoing sanctions and PEP screening protects the scheme from regulatory exposure on every single payment, not just at onboarding. Scheme-level safeguarded accounts mean a compromise in one operational area doesn't put the whole book of payments at risk. And role‑based access in the Hub means the people who can authorise payments are the people who should — with a clear audit trail showing who did what and when. Practising your incident response is the right instinct; doing it on a payments stack that already has these controls baked in makes the practice meaningful.

Q: Everyone's talking about AI in administration. Where does it actually move the needle on payments?

Two places, mostly. The first is the long tail of payment exceptions — returns, mismatched references, name discrepancies — that today eat hours of skilled ops time. Pattern recognition on reason codes and historical fixes lets teams resolve the routine cases automatically and escalate the genuinely unusual ones. The second is reconciliation. Anyone who has tried to match a batch of overseas payments back to scheme-level ledgers knows the pain; AI-assisted matching against real-time status data turns a multi-day reconciliation into something closer to a check-and-confirm.

The administrators getting it right are doing two things at once: deploying AI to reduce manual handling, and being deliberate about the new risks — model drift, opaque decisioning, data residency — that come with it. The platforms underneath need to be ready for that scrutiny.

Q: We can't recruit experienced pensions admin staff. How do we get more out of the team we have?

This one isn't really a payments question, but the payments stack is where it shows up. When an administrator's day is half spent chasing SWIFT investigations, decoding cryptic intermediary deductions and manually reconciling returns, you don't have a recruitment problem so much as a tooling problem. Senior people leave because the work doesn't match the skills they came in with.

Replacing the parts of the day that don't require human judgement — payment status lookups, proof of payment requests, sanctions re-screens — with platform automations frees experienced administrators to do what only they can do: complex member cases, derisking work, governance support. It also makes the role attractive again to the next generation, who quite reasonably expect modern tools rather than a chain of Excel files and email threads.

Q: The Pensions Regulator estimates around £17m is lost to pension fraud every year, roughly £48k a day. How does Navro help protect scheme funds?

Most pension fraud isn't dramatic. It's a steady drip — payments to wrong accounts, members impersonated at the helpline, instalments continuing past death, instructions that look fine until they don't. The fix isn't more vigilance. It's controls that fire on every payment, automatically.

Three layers do the work. Payee verification stops misdirected payments at the door: Confirmation of Payee and global bank validation check that names, accounts and routing match before the money moves. Continuous compliance screening runs sanctions and PEP checks on every payment, not just at onboarding — because circumstances change after a member joins. And life certification, digital and ongoing, picks up deceased members faster than the annual paper exercise was ever built to.

One platform. Three layers. Every payment validated against a live picture of the member, the recipient and the destination. On time, in full, fully visible — and to the right person.

A clearer view of how your payments are really performing

If any of these conversations sound familiar, we'd be pleased to talk them through. Navro's payments curation platform was built for the kind of scrutiny pension schemes face: scheme-level segregation, role-based controls, audit-ready reporting, real-time visibility, and compliance-first execution on every payment.

Curate your payments. . Replace SWIFT uncertainty with local rails and real-time tracking — and give your members the right amount on the right day, every time.

Not sure where your payments stack stands against these questions? We can walk through it with you. Talk to Andrew Woolnough

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