On the go: Five master trusts, including Nest and Now Pensions, have announced a new research project in tandem with the Pensions Policy Institute.
The Pensions Data Project, which is also being backed by B&CE, Smart Pension and Legal & General Investment Management, will merge member data from these providers in order to learn more about how people save.
The project will bring together data from the five providers in an attempt to learn more about master trust members’ saving patterns.
It is seeking to find out more about the number of pension pots belonging to savers, the regularity with which savers switch providers, the size of their pension wealth, and how much this changes over time.
“To understand people’s interconnected financial lives and find ways to support people to be financially secure today and into retirement, we need a joined-up view of their finances,” said Matthew Blakstad, analysis director at Nest Insight.
The initiative launches against a backdrop of concern for the pensions market. In March, Nike Trost, the Financial Conduct Authority’s head of pensions policy, said that the market is one of the least transparent.
A briefing paper published with the launch of the project stated that there is no central “longitudinal research base” of people’s total retirement savings.
“This exists in other countries (such as the US) and is a powerful tool for evidencing how individual citizens’ retirement savings, aggregated across their different schemes and providers, are evolving over time, thus helping to generate evidence-based policy for both pension providers and the UK government,” it said.
In the longer term, the project said it could also incorporate data from other trust-based and contract-based defined contribution schemes, defined benefit schemes and decumulation data.
