As the Money and Pensions Service gears up to test its MoneyHelper pensions dashboard, Ellie Duncan explores how the industry can ensure that consumers get the most from this new service.
The launch of the first government-backed pension dashboard is on the horizon. And, with £31.3bn currently left unclaimed, inactive, or lost in pension pots in the UK, according to the Pensions Policy Institute, it is not hard to see why there might be an initial spike in interest among consumers when it goes live.
For many people, it might feel like winning the lottery when they log onto the MoneyHelper dashboard for the first time and potentially rediscover a ‘lost’ pension pot.
As Martin Freeman, director at Pensio, says: “My guess is that, depending on the publicity it gets, you’ll get an enormous number of people just looking to see if they’ve got money they didn’t realise they had. I think that’s why there’ll be a huge amount of early take-up.”
So, after that initial login, what is going to keep consumers coming back to dashboards?
Rob Yuille, head of long-term savings policy at the Association of British Insurers (ABI), says that to encourage “meaningful” engagement, “dashboards must be accessible through trusted, convenient platforms, and they must provide useful tools that help users understand their pensions and take appropriate action”.
Life stages could dictate usage
Standard Life’s retirement savings director Mike Ambery explains that the frequency at which people use dashboards will likely be based on “different phases of life”.
“Adoption where we can inspire people to do things at a relevant frequency for their stage in life, with short and longer term goals, would be a way of engaging through the dashboard,” Ambery says.
Chris Curry, principal of the Pensions Dashboards Programme at the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS), adds: “What we’ve seen from overseas is that, initially, it’s those who are closer to retirement and taking their pensions who are more likely to adopt the service sooner, and then look at it more frequently.
“But it doesn’t take too long for it to get much wider coverage across different age groups and across different parts of the population.”
What has worked internationally?
The UK pensions industry is in a fortunate position, in that it can look to countries where pensions dashboards are already live to understand what keeps people engaged.
Curry said MaPS’ research has found that estimated retirement income is what “people really value”.
“It’s a feature that’s quite common in international dashboards, and the research there has suggested that it’s the most important feature,” he added.
Independent consultant Richard Smith conducted a tour of Europe in 2023 to discover what the UK can learn from pensions dashboards there.
At the time, as he reported for Pensions Expert, his main findings were that commercial dashboards have proved more popular than government versions, and that people want to access dashboards via their mobiles.
The ABI’s Yuille agrees that private sector dashboards can “significantly increase reach by integrating into platforms consumers already use”, such as banking apps.
He points to Norway, where public and private dashboards “co-exist” and where, in 2023, Norway saw 32 million logins to private platforms compared to 990,000 logins via the government dashboard.
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Dashboards are the future
For Smith, the launch of the government dashboard in the UK is not “the end”, but rather “the birth of something that will continue to evolve”.
“It’s the future of all pensions. Now, all Dutch systems start at the dashboard,” he adds.
“Once dashboards exist, you don’t want to go to a website that only shows you one pension – you want to see your total and then click through to your scheme sites from the dashboard.”
Richard Smith, independent consultant
“Once dashboards exist, you don’t want to go to a website that only shows you one pension – you want to see your total and then click through to your scheme sites from the dashboard.”
Curry, meanwhile, insists “there isn’t a right or wrong cadence for how often you want people to be looking at a pensions dashboard”, but what is important is that “people know where it is and are familiar with it”.
Ellie Duncan is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Open Banking and Financial Inclusion: Creating a Financial System That Provides Security and Equity’.
