 Mallowstreet is currently transforming the way in which members of the professional pensions community communicate and connect. Editor Ellie Burns sits down with Co-CEO Dawid Konotey-Ahulu to discuss the digital platform, from its inception to plans for the future.
EB: mallowstreet is changing the way in which pensions professionals are communicating and interacting with one another. Could you give our readers an insight into how mallowstreet works and what it offers its members?
DKA: I have always been a believer in the “wisdom of wise crowds”, the idea that, if you assemble people with a diverse mix of skills and deep experience, their combined knowledge has the potential to solve extraordinarily complex problems.
Our industry is facing a worrying crisis: it is systemically underfunded in an age of extreme austerity, low growth and few options. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, given the opportunity, this industry’s wise crowd can come up with effective answers to the problem.
That’s why we created mallowstreet; it’s a social media platform for institutional professionals in the pensions industry which allows free, unfettered, communication between its members. That makes for almost frictionless connecting and sharing. As you might expect, we feature blogs, forums, thought-leadership papers, product pages and a directory that maps people and organisations across the pensions eco-system. Real-time discussion happens around all the issues that this industry cares about. The great thing about mallowstreet is that ordinary people can, and do, rapidly become industry influencers. It levels the playing field.
EB: mallowstreet is in its fourth year and appears to be going from strength to strength. What was the thinking behind mallowstreet as a platform for pension professionals?
DKA: As a planet we face several challenges; either we deal with them now, or we will pay the price for generations to come. I’m talking about global security, living more sustainably, conquering the growing threat of disease, repairing the global economy and, fifth, the scourge of insufficient resources in old age. mallowstreet is concerned with that fifth global challenge – retirement resources. This is an issue that can only be managed when the entire industry comes together with the specific common purpose of finding solutions and implementing them. mallowstreet aims to help make that happen.
EB: How does mallowstreet contribute and aid innovation in the pensions industry?
DKA: mallowstreet has facilitated a lot of innovation among solutions providers. They have begun to communicate their values and to engage digitally with their clients. As they develop relationships with the people who run them, they are also starting to understand better the needs and requirements of pension funds.
It’s all very well building a platform on which the industry can connect, but we are much more interested in getting tangible results that address some of the pensions industry’s greatest challenges. So we focus heavily on facilitating collaborative relationships and we obsess about education for the industry. For instance, we hold mallowstreet university dinners most weeks: each dinner is hosted by a Solutions Provider who talks knowledgeably on a topic the community wants to learn about. This week, for example, we’re looking at the challenges and rewards of investing in Latin American markets. There is plenty of investment opportunity in that region, but you really need to know what you’re doing.
We have also just launched a sophisticated “CPD Tracker” which records what you have done on the site and calculates CPD-eligible time spent on mallowstreet. The more you read and participate, the more CPD time you automatically accumulate. Shortly, we are going to launch a relationship tracker which shows how well you know other people.
EB: What have been the main challenges/difficulties you have experienced in trying to accomplish this goal?
DKA: Our biggest challenge has been achieving mass adoption of social media by the industry. It takes years or decades for any industry to establish behavioural patterns, and disrupting those social norms takes time. Some of the pensions industry’s greatest thinkers still haven’t embraced this new way of doing things, and perhaps they never will. But many others have grasped the incredible power of social media to disseminate knowledge and to aggregate opinion.
There have always been - and will always be – certain individuals who think more creatively than their peers. But today, in social media, those lead thinkers have a giant canvas on which to paint their ideas. In the next 12 months, we will see the emergence of a new and powerful group of pensions professionals who will shape the industry for years to come; they will do that by systematically and rapidly disseminating their ideas to an audience that is bigger, more diverse, better informed and more reactive than any audience in history.
EB: Were there any experiences from your previous and current work within the pensions industry which influenced your approach to mallowstreet?
DKA: For as long as I can remember, the pensions industry has suffered from chronic, stifling, barriers to free communication and innovation. Back in 2002, whilst I was working at Merrill Lynch, we came up with an effective strategy to help pension funds manage key market risks. The strategy – which we called Red Alpha – was fairly complicated, flew in the face of conventional wisdom and required explanation and discussion. But, easily the hardest part of the process was actually getting in front of pension fund trustees; it was off-limits for an investment banker to approach a trustee directly. So I had to plead with armies of gatekeeper consultants to let me explain the idea to them; if they liked it, (most did not) they tentatively agreed to raise it at the next “suitable” trustee board meeting. Unsurprisingly, it was virtually impossible to be heard; harder, I imagine, than getting an audience with the White House. For solutions providers, this wasn’t just a problem of distributing solutions; their lack of access meant they had very limited feedback on how to improve their ideas.
Cross-industry barriers were another issue. Until very recently, for example, it would be unusual for a leading pensions lawyer to be on familiar terms with a bank’s pensions specialist or a partner at an accounting firm. And you certainly wouldn’t find the three deep in conversation with a couple of trustees in a wine bar. But that’s exactly what must happen for transformational innovation to take place. The only reason the Age of Enlightenment came about was because diverse folk like Hooke, Boyle and Newton met in coffee shops kicking their new ideas around and asking each other hard questions. Until then, you had a bunch of alchemists and monks who came up with all the bright ideas - which they kept to themselves. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t get much done.
To me, the pensions eco-system has always seemed overly protective against free, creative discussion and we built mallowstreet in response. The reason it has worked so well, I think, is because it met a need.
EB: How does mallowstreet compare to other existing social media platforms? What does mallowstreet offer members which other platforms do not?
DKA: In some ways, mallowstreet is like LinkedIn or Facebook in that it brings people together irrespective of location or geography, but in many respects it is very different. For a start, mallowstreet is focused on the issues and people of a single industry. I heard someone describe LinkedIn as Mile wide, inch deep. If that’s true, mallowstreet is Inch wide, mile deep. All the assets of all the pension plans on mallowstreet amount to almost £2 trillion – an immense asset base simply concerned with the challenge of making sure people get paid their pensions in full and on time! mallowstreet is also differentiated by its closed-ness: people say more than they would be willing to say on other, more open platforms, which means it features more candid views, truer insight and freer sharing of ideas.
EB: Recently there have been many concerns regarding social media – privacy, misuse, libel etc. With this in mind, what do you think the next step is in the evolution of social media?
DKA: Social media is deceptively powerful and, like all things disruptive and revolutionary, it must be handled with care. Corporations are right to keep close tabs on social media activity. It’s an arena in which minor issues turn quickly into major issues when a company underestimates just how fast a carefully managed brand can be wrecked.
So the future is in “safe haven” social media platforms offering super-high levels of hygiene. That’s when every individual on the site is highly desirable. We get that by insisting on two basic criteria: a community of professionals who are 100% respectful of other members, and a community united by a powerful common purpose for good. If that’s not you, we don’t let you in.
mallowstreet is part of that next evolutionary wave, which is why an important feature is that it’s a closed platform, only open to those who play some role in the institutional pensions industry. The last Royal Wedding is a good analogy; there were 1,900 guests drawn from a population of over 60 million. Mostly, these were the nation’s leaders, power brokers and influencers. Similarly, for these new, niche social media sites, it will be less about high membership numbers and more about giving a platform to a small group of influencers and decision makers involved in deep problem solving. The Hookes, Boyles and Newtons of the pensions industry, if you like.
EB: How do you for see mallowstreet growing and developing in the future? Where do you see mallowstreet in 5 years’ time? What would you have hoped to achieve in that time?
DKA: On mallowstreet, we are all about collaborative innovation, and that only happens when the right group of people works together. I just got back from Silicon Valley where I met some exciting entrepreneurs who are driving serious change. It’s clearly no accident they are the guys who gave us Apple, Google, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and, basically, 95% of modern web technology. They’re driven by a common purpose: to use all existing technology at their disposal to create useful stuff no-one has dreamt possible. There are no limits to what they believe they can achieve. Everyone in every coffee shop in Sand Hill Road, Palo Alto, is on a mission. They’re out to change the world, and they know they can do it because they have done it before. mallowstreet shares that vision. The landscape is changing so quickly it’s impossible to predict what mallowstreet will achieve in the next five years, but one thing is certain – the wise folk on mallowstreet will have made major in-roads into helping to deal with the fifth global challenge.
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