Juha Seppanen, Product Manager

I have worked in the pension industry for more than 20 years. I have held many titles and served many roles. During this time, I have seen our influence on the once-in-a-lifetime retirement experience for our clients' participants.

In my current role, I am privileged to manage the direction of our North American mid-market retirement administration platform, which includes a participant-facing website, an administrative suite and various other support tools. One of the best aspects of my job is that I get to interact with many stakeholders, including the service center; client users; and teams across legal, technology, implementation, governance, excellence, administration and more. These interactions constantly remind me how different perspectives can change my view of our product and the participant experience.

I have been able to use these different perspectives to influence our participants' experiences. For example, with our paperless Retire Online feature, I have seen participants move away from requesting and sending paper documents to processing their entire retirement online. Similarly, during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, we created and offered an online portal (Document Exchange) to client HR managers to better communicate with their workforce, most of whom needed to stay at home.

In the end, it is the high-quality work that we do that matters to participants. All the little things add up and enable us to provide an excellent retirement experience to our clients' participants.