Partner at Aon, posting mainly about pensions stuff, plus random other things I find interesting
Interesting comment from the former pensions minister about quality of data and pensions dashboards. I spend about half of my week thinking about pensions dashboards, and honestly data quality is the least of my concerns right now. What would be higher on my own list? - Huge practical challenges about how to actually comply with regulations, because DB pension schemes are complex with many moving parts, sometimes across multiple providers, while regulations assume they are simple and can be neatly summarised in a couple of figures - Lack of final standards, which mean that pension schemes and providers are still in the dark on crucial aspects of what they need to do and how they need to do it. Even data standards that tell schemes what they need to send to dashboards are still changing - Tens (maybe hundreds) of millions of pounds being spent by schemes preparing calculations that have never been needed before, don't actually help members, and serve no purpose other than to meet a legislative requirement - The idea that on a given day, perhaps in 2026, 40m individuals will be given access to dashboards on the same day, leading to a massive spike in demand which will cause huge problems and lead to the most newsworthy story on dashboards being about how they cannot cope with initial demand - Concern about members misunderstanding what they see, leading to bad decisions and complaints. Also concerns about potential for cyber incidents and “scam” dashboards, as well as genuine dashboards pushing paid-for services to unsuspecting members in order to recoup their investment There is a longer list, but I’ll stick with that for now. Don’t get me wrong – despite my gripe list I’m 100% supportive of pensions dashboards. It’s absolutely the right policy, and is essential to bring pensions into the digital age. And data quality is essential for them to succeed. But the implication that data is the main challenge facing the project is overly simplistic. I expect the former minister recognises this, and the comments in the article are no doubt just a small part of what was discussed in a longer interview. But greater recognition of the wider issues, and the unresolved challenges caused by the regulatory environment itself, would be refreshing. https://lnkd.in/e6qGZrDE
Jonathan Hawkins
3mo
Completely agree Paul. There’s a lot of moving parts and still a lot of unknowns only 7 months away from the first schemes meeting their duties. One of the biggest own goals I think will be spurious accuracy expected at day one. To my mind, initially, dashboards have a few key desired outcomes. Firstly, reuniting people with pensions and giving them broad (simple!) “At retirement”numbers and contact details for the scheme should they want more detail. Secondly, for DC schemes, showing proliferation and making folks think about them and maybe make some decisions. Once all this is up and running, then we can work on what is useful for members of DB arrangements, DC arrangements, and further tolls and integrations. The primary goal has to get something safe live. Then build on it.
Optimising occupational pensions for sponsors, schemes and members
3moInsightful as always, Paul. Members should always be at the heart of things, which I know they are in the fundamental idea of dashboards, but you’re not losing sight of them along the way 😊 There might be an irony in me going on too much about data, but it puts me in mind of something I spoke with Lauren Ramsey before - which is basically thinking about all the data you need for various projects first (be that dashboard, GMP, wider benefit corrections, endgame or something else). Then and only then do you start “rooting”. She called it sequencing 💡