Pensions dashboards will take away a lot of administrative tasks from advisers as all their clients' pensions information will be in one place, according to this week’s FTAdviser Podcast guests.
Pensions dashboards will allow people to see information about all their pensions in one place. It will include all their private pensions, defined benefit or defined contribution, retail or workplace, old or new, as well as any public sector pensions and, importantly, their state pension as well.
Next year the onboarding process for the pension dashboard programme will kick off and while providers will have to go through the crux of the issues by getting savers’ data ready, in the long term this will be very helpful for advisers.
Appearing on the podcast Heather Hopkins, founder of NextWealth, said dashboards will signal the end of people outsourcing their administration tasks to their adviser.
Hopkins said: “The less time that advice firms spend chasing down information on the various pensions that people have then the more time they have to help people to think about whether they are on track to achieve the retirement that they want.
“The more that they can spend time on that, the better and dashboards hopefully should help with that because less time will be spent chasing up information from providers and clients.”
She added: “I don't want to oversell it because the first is going to be pretty basic. It's not going to have all of the details on cost and all the benefits associated with plans but at least it's that first step.”
Also appearing on the podcast, Jonathan Hawkins, consultant at Bravura, agreed that the less time advisers spend chasing up pensions information then the better it will be for both advisers and clients.
He said: “For example, you could have a new client in a meeting and you could take them through a journey on the iPad as an adviser.
“You could then get them to go on to the pensions dashboard, give you consent so you can get the information for their policies, and within a couple of minutes you could have all of their pensions information at your fingertips and have that discussion there.
“That is something they can't do today. So that really largely cuts down the admin time.”
amy.austin@ft.com