Dawn of the dashboards?
Editorial: The pensions dashboard will, it is hoped, change the way people look at their pension in more than the literal sense.
In a blog post on pensions-expert.com, Origo’s Paul Pettitt argues that providers and administrators will have to ensure searchability of their databases by ‘opening up’ systems, providing high-quality data and reviewing systems performance to cope with the number of requests.
Pension schemes need to be ready to surf the tech wave, Altus Business Systems’ Ben Cocks agrees (read his comment piece here), because there is a regulatory push for more competition in financial services. The dashboard will, it is expected, make it easier for people to consolidate or move their pension assets.
Some have expressed concern about the dashboard for other reasons, saying it could undermine scheme efforts to communicate with members in a more detailed way (read why).
But many people are members of more than one pension scheme, and it is high time reality accounted for that – ensuring they can view their details through a single interface, without having to learn to navigate the website of each provider, mastertrust and company scheme they are a client or member of, some of which they might have forgotten about.
This does not mean scheme communications are no longer needed; they are, but it would not surprise me if the dashboard will incorporate a comms function for individual schemes at some point in the future.
The dashboard should be seen as a welcome development. However, the fact that there will be a variety of dashboards – as announced by the Treasury's Simon Kirby six months ago – is arguably a setback in the quest for user-friendliness.
The Association of British Insurers says its project to create the "plumbing" behind what users see "can drive a diversity of dashboards to suit people's circumstances and preferences and to allow innovation, the government’s stated intention from the beginning".
If each dashboard will, as one would expect, come up with the same data for a specific person, it should not reduce their effectiveness. But such diversity risks further confusing consumers, who are trying to understand pensions in an already highly fragmented system.
Sandra Wolf is editor at Pensions Expert. You can follow her on Twitter @SandraCWK and the team @pensions_expert.