Now that autumn and the end of the millennium are here, I can’t help but look back and be amazed at how much this business has changed since I worked on my first pension account in Montreal back in the year of the great exposition. Of course they had a ‘new technology’ pavilion at Expo ‘67, but I don’t recall anybody foreseeing any of the innovations that have such a large presence in our lives today.

Back in 1967, the futurist vision was a jet helicopter in every garage and a robotic maid in every kitchen. It seems the focus of their projections was mostly on time-saving devices, and we all know what happened to our goals of having more free time!

Speaking of free time, I did manage to sneak a few days this summer to go sailing up on Georgian Bay on the Sherry Nadine. While most people think of sailing as a fairly low-tech venture, I can assure you that the pace of technological change in the sailing world has paralleled or outstripped just about anything we see in business. The Sherry Nadine, like so many boats today, is equipped with a global positioning system which not only tells you where exactly you are located at any given time, it will also let you punch in way-points on your chart, and then the boat will automatically sail from way-point to way-point.

Add to that the depth sounders and warning systems and satellite-phones and data uplinks, and you would think that a modern sailboat is surrounded by so many overlapping foolproof electronic systems that nothing could ever possibly go wrong. That’s what we thought, until one fine day in late July when we were cruising up a channel at about four knots and suddenly the boat stood still. If you can appreciate what kind of force it takes to make a twenty-five thousand pound sailboat come to an instantaneous dead stop, then you can appreciate the size of the rock we hit.

As far as we could ascertain in the aftermath of the ‘event’, the rock was not damaged. Fortunately, the boat did not receive too much damage either, although the same cannot be said of the occupants. The bodies on board suddenly learned first hand about the law of physics that says a body in motion shall remain in motion. When yours truly regained consciousness, I had a wonderful insight about technology: it ain’t worth squat when there’s an unmarked obstacle in the channel!

Which brings me back to the business world. Technology can be a great enabler for business, but you still have to pay attention to the fundamentals. In this issue of Signature, we describe the opening of our new office in Curaçao. Amazingly, almost every part of this expansion was facilitated through the Internet, from the initial contact to the final contract. Thirty-years ago, expanding a business like ours to a new country and a new culture would have required innumerable trips and market studies and research reports and task forces. Today, a company can receive a single e-mail enquiry from its website, as we did, and that is all it takes to set the ball in motion.

But as we learned on the Sherry Nadine, technology isn’t the answer to everything. Penad is in the Caribbean market because it is the right thing for our company. We have been working with pension plan sponsors in the Caribbean since 1995, and the opening of our Willemstad office is the natural continuation of that work. So technology played a very important role, but technology did not in any way supercede the application of sound business practices.

In this issue of Signature, we also touch on a few other topics, from the need for clear communications when pension plan members are terminated to Penad’s involvement in providing Life and Health benefit plans. So enjoy this issue as we wish you Happy Sailing!