Origo has announced it is building a pensions dashboard ‘engine’ which it claims will enable the industry to efficiently support consumer pension consolidation portals.
The firm was originally launched by a group of the UK’s financial institutions in 1989 to facilitate the development of electronic trading between principals and agents for life, pensions and collective investment business.
Now, many of these providers have backed its latest plans for the frequently-proposed dashboard, including Aegon, Ageas, Aviva, Axa Wealth, Friends Life, Just Retirement, MetLife, Legal & General, Prudential, Royal London, Scottish Widows, Standard Life, Unum and Zurich.
In September 2015, Origo announced its plans to help the industry create a pension register service for the public. UK consumers with pensions across multiple providers had no secure, simple, digital and automated means of viewing their total pensions worth at that time, it stated.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, the Tax Incentivised Savings Association also confirmed its plans to help the industry make the pensions dashboard a reality, building on the Tisa Exchange (Tex) model as a template.
Recommendations set out in the Financial Advice Market Review’s final report put forward a 2019 target date for the dashboard’s creation. It explained this “consumer-friendly digital interface” would display information about all of an individual’s pension savings in one place.
Jamie Jenkins, head of pensions strategy at Standard Life, said they have been actively working with the Cabinet Office to start developing a pensions dashboard, backed by existing government work around Open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), or technology that enables interaction.
“Origo is currently in the final stages of delivering an integration hub to enable providers and platforms to more efficiently share data with third parties,” he stated.
“This service already supports the sharing of pension valuations, a critical component of the dashboard landscape. Extending this to support dashboards is a relatively straightforward and natural development.”
Origo’s managing director Paul Pettitt argued that as well as working with the pensions industry to deliver the dashboard engine, it is also working with the cross-industry Pension Finder Alpha Project, run by the Open Identity Exchange and the Cabinet Office.
“Origo is leading the architecture and standards workstream in that project and would look to work within the governance framework proposed through this process.”
ruth.gillbe@ft.com
