OpinionApr 25 2017

Dashboard services will augment advice, says ABI

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Trying to anticipate the future of technology and its impact on society is always interesting, but notoriously fraught with difficulty - as the BBC series Tomorrow’s World demonstrates.

In April 1969, Tomorrow’s World focused on the office of the future, with presenter James Burke introducing the

BJ-39 robot as the answer to the human secretary. Burke mused that his filing cabinet that made instant coffee and shuffled around your desk was ‘much better than a human being’.

Evidence from any office, anywhere in the world today suggests otherwise.

While the footage seems outdated, the idea that technological advances will replace the need for humans is certainly topical.

Headlines suggest that jobs in any sphere or industry will soon be hollowed out and people will be replaced by a mixture of robotics and algorithms.

We had a chance to glimpse into the future, and see what services could be created using data from the dashboard.

Throughout our engagement with the groups of industry stakeholders for the Pensions Dashboard, several people have posed a similar question, and asked whether the services enabled by the Pensions Dashboard will diminish the role of financial advisers.

Rather than entertain this false dichotomy between technology and traditional face to face financial advice, the ABI believes dashboard services are more likely to augment and enhance the role of financial advisers.

Dashboards will seek to aggregate an individual’s pension information from providers and the state, onto a platform which could be shared with a financial adviser.

This would reduce – but not remove entirely – the reliance on paper based communications in the initial fact find, freeing up advisers to spend more time on delivering specialist financial advice to clients.

Initial discussions with potential providers of commercial dashboard services suggest they are likely to signpost consumers towards a financial adviser when the time is right – helping a new generation to realise the value of professional advice.

The message from HM Treasury is clear: the dashboard cannot be a singular, monolithic government or industry run service.

Instead, the dashboard will be built with an open approach that allows the data to be harnessed by a multitude of new consumer centric services – allowing financial advisers and platforms, as well as providers, employers, administrators and others to launch their own dashboard services.

Potentially, this could facilitate a closer relationship with clients that could extend far beyond scheduled meetings and allow financial advice to become part of a consumer’s daily activities.

At the Pensions Dashboard TechSprint event where the Economic Secretary to the Treasury spoke to developers and the project contributors, we had a chance to glimpse into the future, and see what services could be created using data from the dashboard.

Within 18 hours, several teams had programmed Amazon’s Alexa to hold a conversation about your pension; built tools to deliver guidance tailored to specific life events; and created new services that displayed data regarding your financial health alongside data from fitness trackers.

Each of these demonstrated a fundamental reshaping of retirement communications and new ways of engaging with clients which could be used by advisers.

The ABI believes that the dashboard network will act as a shared utility for the entire industry, and will help to catalyse a much needed wave of innovation in the sector.

We believe the advice community is a vitally important constituency that we must work closely with to ensure the successful delivery of the dashboard by 2019.

You can hear more about the pensions dashboard and other pensions-related content at the ABI Long-Term Savings Conference on 4 July, 2017. Click here for more details.

Rob Yuille is assistant director, head of retirement policy, at the Association of British Insurers