The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) has begun testing its pensions dashboard with consumers from outside the pensions industry for the first time, it announced this week.
The organisation began its first testing phase in September, with a limited number of industry experts logging in and recording their experiences. Oliver Morley, chief executive of MaPS, identified a ‘lost’ pension during his test of the dashboard.
The Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) said on its website that “low volume” testing was set to begin this month and continue over the next few months.
“The focus will be on ensuring the service is broadly working as expected and identifying any critical or severe pain points that need to be resolved,” PDP said.
This phase of testing will include up to 300 users, primarily “non-pensions specialist employees” of pension companies connected to the wider dashboards ecosystem.
Of this group, PDP said around 50 would be in “moderated” testing environments observed directly by MaPS researchers. The remainder of the testers will “help preparations for future phases, informing the scope of higher volume testing”, it said.
One of the aims of this phase of testing is to assess the likely support needs of users. It will not yet look at the industry’s ability to address “possible matches”, whereby pensions are identified that may be attached to a particular user but need further information for verification.
The findings will inform how MaPS and PDP approach the “high volume” stage of user testing, as well as its timing.
The current iteration of the MoneyHelper Dashboard – the service run by MaPS that is set to be the only dashboard available for the time being – displays the state pension alongside “simple” defined benefit and defined contribution pensions, PDP said. Functionality for other pension types will be added in future iterations of MoneyHelper.
