The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) has set up an interim identity service for its Pensions Dashboard Progamme (PDP).
The arm’s length body of the Department for Work and Pensions has agreed on a two-year contract valued at £1.8 million with Netherlands based company Digidentity.
The move is intended to support the initial testing phases of the PDP programme, which is aimed at giving users a choice of online dashboards, each of which would provide all of their pension information within a single source.
It will also involve an assessment of how the identity market is developing in line with the proposed UK digital identity and attributes trust framework, launched and later updated last year by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to provide a foundation for a market in relevant services.
The contract notice states: “The identity service provides a key function within the core architecture for the Pensions Dashboards ecosystem.
“The aim is to give users confidence that access to their pension information is protected and additionally to give pension providers confidence that they are releasing information to the right person.”
Digidentity is strongly established in the digital identity market, being just one of two organisations, along with the Post Office, that still has a role in the Government’s Verify service. While Verify is scheduled to be wound down by next year the Dutch company’s continued stake and involvement with PDP could give it a strong position under the new framework.
In September of last year a deal was signed with Capgemini for the central technical architecture of the PDP, opening the way for the development and testing phase to begin.
Alternative providers
Programme director Richard James said in a blogpost that, while MaPS is building a dashboard, it is keen to see other organisations such as banks, pension providers and fintechs offering alternatives. PDP is currently working with Aviva, Bud and Moneyhub on possibilities.
“Our testing will also support the development of the necessary technical and design standards for dashboards,” he said. “Much of the objective for these standards is to mitigate potential consumer harms, such as individuals making detrimental financial decisions after using a dashboard or failing to understand the information they see.
“We need to define what we must standardise and where we can allow providers flexibility to meet the needs of specific user segments. The testing will help us determine what good looks like and what we need to mandate for future dashboards. We’re already carrying out user research and our alpha testing will consolidate our initial learnings.
“We will also be able to test the commercial proposition. To see how layering value-add services around the dashboard can work. Dashboards themselves are not allowed to make calculations for example but this facility might be on offer elsewhere to support consumers.
“Our testing with the early-connecting providers will help us understand what will and what won’t help dashboard users.”
Image from iStock, Igor Kutyaev
