This article was originally published on the website of MBWL, Milliman’s joint venture with Barnett Waddingham, Lurse, and Normandin Beaudry that offers retirement and benefits consulting for multinationals of all sizes. Read the full article here.

The pace of change in the global retirement landscape shows no sign of slowing. Regulatory reform, market conditions, and technological innovation are reshaping how retirement risks are managed and how outcomes are delivered for members. We highlight four key areas for global pension directors in 2026:

• Plan governance and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is turning fragmented retirement data into a single, reliable view across defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) retirement plans, as well as other savings and severance plans offered to employees worldwide.
• The future of global retirement strategy. Global retirement design is experiencing rapid transformation, driven by demographic shifts, economic pressures, and technological innovation. People are living longer, healthier lives, meaning retirement could span 20 to 35 years or more, requiring significantly larger levels of funding.
• Evolving pension risk transfer solutions. Rising bond yields and positive equity market returns in major economies led to improved net balance sheet positions for many DB plans at year-end 2025. Improvements in funding positions over recent years have led many multinationals to accelerate efforts to remove DB pension risk from their corporate balance sheets through pension risk transfers.
• A disciplined global pension accounting approach. A coordinated accounting framework can correct compliance with global accounting standards, withstand increasing auditor scrutiny, identify unnecessarily prudent assumptions and valuation approaches, reduce management and audit efforts, and improve transparency and control across jurisdictions.