“HMT should challenge the industry to make a pensions dashboard available to consumers by 2019, bringing together industry and consumer representatives to help them set direction and drive progress.”
HMT and FCA, 2016
Pensions provision is changing and individuals must increasingly take more responsibility for planning ahead to ensure their financial well-being in retirement. For many, automatic enrolment is providing the means to do this, but more needs to be done to support the shift towards a more saving-oriented culture and to enable better long-term financial decisions. For those more involved in the other end of the savings journey, the new pension freedoms introduced in 2015 have provided people with greater access to their pension savings and more flexibility in their choices of how to take retirement income.
Against this backdrop of change and increased complexity in the choices consumers must make, the ability for individuals to view all of their pension savings, alongside their State Pension entitlement, in one place, is essential. Engagement with financial services is increasingly digital in nature with more people accessing financial information and services online, so delivering a pensions dashboard with the interest of consumers first and foremost, represents an opportunity to transform the relationship people have with their pensions savings.
Interested organisations and companies had already formed a Project Team in early 2016 and started exploratory work, so welcomed the Government’s challenge. The Alpha Phase officially started in February 2016 with 14 organisations representing the views of consumers, the financial services industry and the Government.
This phase concentrated on aggregating a comprehensive picture of people’s accumulated pension savings including defined-benefit pensions and defined-con tribution pensions alongside the State Pension.
The core project focused on the following areas: consumer journeys; consumer research; architecture and data standards; and policy and governance.
Accompanying Results Presentation:
Delivered by Jackie Spencer, Money Advice Service and Michael Roe, Origo
Project Participants:
Association of British Insurers, Altus Business Systems, Aviva, B&CE, Barclays, Cabinet Office, EY Seren, HSBC, LV, The Money Advice Service, NEST, Origo, The Pensions Advice Service, Standard Life
Learn about the results of this project in the White Paper.