Highlighting the efforts made by some regulatory bodies with regards to poor data standards, he continues: “To be fair to TPR, they are very aware of the quality of record keeping with some schemes and they are making it clear that they will expect them to improve that record keeping.”
Dashboards around the world
A number of countries had dashboard projects up and running long before the FCA had put forward the recommendation for its own version in December 2014.
Sweden’s dashboard model has had some growing pains, but was first established as early as 2004, five years after the Swedish Pensions Agency launched their relatively limited paper version of the service – an annual statement on the state pension.
Following a Royal London conference on ‘Pensions dashboards around the world’, the provider published a paper under the same name outlining the successes and shortfalls of dashboards in the Netherlands, Sweden and Australia, with a view to apply any valuable insights to the UK project.
Royal London’s Mr Evans notes that one of the most important lessons learned from earlier pensions dashboards was that “the more interventionist the sponsoring body is – the government in this case – the quicker and more comprehensive the coverage”.
“Take the Swedish example. They’ve been labouring at this for well over a decade and they’ve yet to get fully off the ground, although it seems to have made some major breakthroughs in recent times for going online and getting a lot more uptake from private pension companies.”
Noting that Australia’s dashboard, which is hosted by the Australian Tax Office, legislated to make participation compulsory, Mr Evans adds: “They got it done much quicker, which leads us to the conclusion that some form of government leadership on this is necessary – and, if not actual legislation, the threat of it if pension companies aren’t seen to be willing to join in and contribute their data.”
Industry support to make the dashboard mandatory for providers has been pushed by pensions dashboard affiliates as well as other industry representatives.
Nathan Long, senior pensions analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, says: “Put simply, the pension dashboard will fail if it is not made mandatory. The service is significantly undermined if members do not have the confidence of seeing all of their pensions in one place. Plenty of pension providers do not have any incentive to develop the systems to plug into the dashboard. There are still pensions out there that are not even fully administered on computer systems.“
