Origo eyes auto-enrolment for future standards

A digital standards company is considering how to implement systems to facilitate auto-enrolment between employers and pension providers.

Origo, which defines e-commerce standards allowing the smooth transition of data between companies, told Money Management it would be necessary to design a set for the influx of pension savers predicted following auto-enrolment.

“There is a huge number of small and medium-sized enterprises with a whole raft of payroll systems,” said Paul Pettitt, managing director or Origo. “Then there is NEST [and its] competitors, all of whom need to be able to shift pensions around.”

The idea of the standards is that, if two separate systems employ them, they will be able to communicate with one another to make data transfer more efficient and reduce time spent re-keying information.

Pettitt said there is a big market for implementing such standards in the auto-enrolment space due to the vast amount of data needing to transfer between several parties.

“It might be the employer’s HR system, moving data to the provider, the employer might want to identify who is in a scheme and who isn’t,” he said. “You have contributions to work out, opt-outs to deal with – handling all that data and the processes around it.”

While Origo’s financial services standards are used widely across the financial services industry, linking up with HR and payroll systems will be largely new ground for the firm.

“We are having to start to talk to the payroll suppliers and HR managers,” Pettitt said. “We are getting some of the bigger HR companies engaged.”

This is a challenge in itself, he said, since there are both large companies and many small companies in the payroll sector.

“It is a big, long journey and we are only just getting going on it,” he said.