The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has launched a consultation on its Pensions Dashboard Programme.
It is aiming to collect feedback on what data should be included and how it should be displayed to users on the online dashboards.
The programme is aimed at providing a framework for dashboards to give people easy access to information about their various pensions. The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) is developing one but the programme provides scope for alternative providers to make their own offerings in line with standard requirements.
The consultation document sets out that dashboards should provide information on accrued and projected values of their pensions, and the key stages of how they should work. They will include the use of a pension finder service that does not hold any information but acts as a switchboard sending the user’s request to find information to all pension schemes.
There are also proposals for the value data required from relevant occupational pension schemes and specific requirements for state pension information.
Other sections cover how the dashboards will operate, what occupational pension schemes will be required to do, the sequencing of scheme connections, compliance and enforcement, and requirements for a dashboard to qualify under the programme.
Change the landscape
Chris Curry, principle of the Pensions Dashboards Programme, said: “Dashboards will completely change the retirement savings landscape, giving people more opportunities to engage with their pensions than ever before. This improved future for savers can only be delivered by government, regulators and the pensions industry working together.
“This consultation is a huge step forward, providing greater clarity for industry on the steps they will need to take to deliver dashboards.
“But beyond engaging with this consultation there are already many actions that pension schemes can take to progress their dashboards journey. Reviewing and preparing their data, considering the use of an ISP to connect to the dashboards ecosystem and organisational preparation, including ensuring they have the right team in place to deliver this work, can all be done now.”
The MaPS has already taken steps to develop a digital identity service to underpin the use of pension dashboards. It has recently signed a £1.8 million deal with Digidentity to support the testing phases of the programme, and plans an assessment of how the identity market is developing in line with the proposed UK digital identity and trust framework.
Image from iStock, Igor Kutyaev
