When a client asks you for retirement planning advice, you usually need more than a single form: pillar 3a statements, the current pension fund certificate, proof of any vested benefits accounts, and sometimes a copy of the advance care mandate. These documents rarely arrive in an orderly fashion. They turn up as email attachments, scanned on the office copier, or the client sends photos taken on their phone, sometimes complete, sometimes not. Anyone collecting these documents for several clients at once quickly loses track of what has already come in and what is still missing. And because retirement planning is a matter of trust, a well-organised process comes across as far more professional to the client than a loose back-and-forth of emails.
Why Pension Documents Form a Sensitive Dossier
Pension documents are not just paperwork. A pension fund certificate reveals income, retirement savings and often details about family circumstances. An advance care mandate can contain indications about someone's state of health or the people they trust most. Anyone who accepts such documents is handling personal data that deserves careful, traceable treatment, not only from the client's point of view, but also in light of your own duty of care as a broker or trustee.
That is exactly why it pays off to create clear structures for this area: who submitted which document and when, who has viewed it, and where it currently sits.
The Documents That Typically Belong in a Pension Dossier
Depending on the mandate and the client's personal situation, the list varies, but a few documents appear in almost every case:
- Pillar 3a policies or account statements from recent years
- The current pension fund certificate, renewed every year
- Proof of one or more vested benefits accounts
- A copy of the advance care mandate, if one exists
- Where relevant: marriage or cohabitation agreement with a bearing on beneficiary designation
Sound advice requires not just the documents themselves, but also an overview of what is still outstanding from whom, especially when several pension providers or vested benefits accounts are involved.
Where Email and Paper Piles Reach Their Limits
In practice, collecting these documents often runs through the same channel as every other piece of client correspondence: email. The problem is not just the lack of encryption on many email connections, but above all the lack of overview. After a few weeks, the pension fund certificate is sitting somewhere in the inbox, the vested benefits account confirmation arrived as a photo via WhatsApp, and nobody can say at a glance whether the version on file is actually the latest one. With paper documents, there is the added burden of filing, copying and eventually searching for them again.
A Dossier per Client Creates Order
A structured dossier is designed for exactly this situation: for each client, you set up a requirements checklist, for example a pillar 3a statement, the current year's pension fund certificate, or proof of a vested benefits account. The client submits the matching documents directly through the secure client portal, with no detour through email attachments. For every document you see a live status, submitted, under review or approved, so you know at a glance what is still missing without having to chase the client for it.
On top of that, every submitted document can be approved digitally as soon as you have checked it, and an access log records who viewed which document and when. That creates traceability, which matters a great deal in an area where people often ask, later on, who had which version of a document and when. The contact timeline in the CRM helps as well, keeping notes and tasks around the pension consultation in the same place as the documents themselves. That way, at the next advisory appointment you no longer need to search through several inboxes and folders, but simply open a single dossier.
Security That Matches the Subject
Because pension documents are among the most sensitive papers you receive from clients, the technical foundation needs to match: hosting exclusively in Switzerland, encryption of the data, strict separation between clients, and a process that meets the requirements of Switzerland's Data Protection Act (revDSG). That way, collecting pension documents stays not only practical but also cleanly documented, a point that matters if a query or an audit ever comes up. And from the very first moment, the client can see that their sensitive documents sit in a protected area rather than in open email traffic.
finra.ch offers exactly this structure: a secure client portal with dossiers, a requirements checklist and an access log, on its own subdomain for your office. Visit /funktionen to see how the dossier works in detail. You can try finra.ch free for 30 days, no credit card required, with plans starting at CHF 29 per month, and the application runs directly in your browser.