Empowering savers to engage with their pensions through pensions dashboards will bring both opportunities and challenges for the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), according to the head of the dashboards project.
At an industry event this week Chris Curry, principal at the Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP), said that by the end of this year around 90% of all pension scheme members should be able to access the MoneyHelper pension dashboard.
This is the government-backed dashboard currently in development by the Money and Pensions Service. The organisation is expected to begin user testing this summer.
Curry told delegates at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association’s local authority conference that they needed to prepare for connection to the dashboard ecosystem. The official deadline for the LGPS is 31 October 2025, with the final deadline for all schemes set for 12 months later.
“We have to be aware that all the international experience shows that this is only the start of a journey, and a dashboard is the start of a journey for an individual,” Curry said.
“When they have seen their information, it’s really important they then know what they can do with that information going forward.”
Holistic dashboards and artificial intelligence
Curry also pointed out there would be an interplay between data and the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
He said: “You’ll start to see it expanding out and looking at how that might fit into open finance more generally, where people can see pensions alongside other forms of saving, other assets, potentially debts as well, in order to get a much more holistic view.”
Chris Connelly, chief strategy officer at technology company Heywood, said members were showing an earlier adoption of technology than many providers.
“They are being given tools that we haven’t given them,” he said. “We’re just providing information to dashboards. We didn’t give them ChatGPT. We didn’t give them summarising tools like Gemini.
“They’re ahead of the game in terms of the tools they’re using to try and understand pensions, and we didn’t give them those tools.”
“If you’re not the trusted voice in your member’s ear, scammers are going to have a much easier time of it than they already have.”
Jo Quarterman, Norfolk Pension Fund
Jo Quarterman, head of governance at the Norfolk Pension Fund, warned delegates that pension scheme members may be targeted by scammers.
“If you’re not the trusted voice in your member’s ear, scammers are going to have a much easier time of it than they already have, because the one group of people that really are digital by default are the scammers,” Quarterman said.
Beware of the ‘digital divide’
Abbi Leech, chief finance officer at Local Pensions Partnership Administration, said the digitisation of pensions needed to be inclusive and warned against going too far in one direction.
“Digital can divide and in fact we need to ask if we can trust it,” she said. “Trust in our pension funds is absolutely fundamental now, particularly as we move into the next phase of digital AI.”
Leech said the industry should be wary of pushing people towards digital services first.
“It means that we design services that are fit for purpose for those who use them digitally,” she said. “But we also don’t forget those who can’t use – or prefer not to use – technology.
“My youngest daughter [is] obviously a digital native, but she changed her bank recently so that she had a branch nearby that she could go into.”
