Firing lineApr 18 2023

‘We could do the pensions dashboards for the government’

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‘We could do the pensions dashboards for the government’
Duncan Stevens, chief executive of Gretel (Carmen Reichman/FTAdviser)

For the chief executive of Gretel, a fintech that says it has created an “everything” dashboard for lost assets, the government’s stuttering pensions dashboards project is close to complete implosion — and it might do well to lean on his company.

Considering the latest delay in the dashboards, Duncan Stevens, who set up Gretel in early 2020, says: “We managed to create a dashboard that covers not just pensions but everything, in less than a year for a fraction of the cost.” 

Pensions minister Laura Trott put the brakes on the dashboards programme in March — one of a litany of problems the project has faced — saying that more time would be needed to comply with regulation.

Stevens became interested in the concept during his 12 years at wealth management support company Equiniti, where he was involved in the government’s old Dormant Assets Scheme and where he saw firsthand the number of problems with asset recovery.

Fast-forward four years and Gretel is now a fully functioning platform that searches for lost accounts, though it continues to sign on new financial providers. “Having already created most of the functionality that the dashboard is trying to create, and being live now, we could, if the government wanted to change its mind, do it for them,” he says. 

A sense of inevitability

The most recent delay announced by the government is likely to be indefinite, a state of affairs Stevens finds “heartbreaking” for people who have invested their careers in the dashboards. A lot of the delay is from the government’s side rather than from the project itself, he says.

Alongside the industry’s frustration, there is a sense of almost inevitability. He believes that many in the industry are “convinced” the dashboards will collapse entirely.

“As a minimum, we’re now talking three years (in delays), so [it will be] 2026 before the public will get any opportunity to search through the government’s dashboard,” Stevens adds, which he says is “unacceptable”.

Some 700,000 people reach retirement age every year — in a three-year period that is more than 2mn people. 

The cost is another salient point for comparison. An impact paper from the Department for Work and Pensions suggested in 2019 that the likely ongoing cost of developing the pensions dashboards could be anywhere from £245mn to £1.48bn. 

Duncan Stevens says the latest delay in the pensions dashboards is ‘unacceptable’ (Carmen Reichman/FTAdviser)

 Gretel, on the other hand, has so far spent a more modest £1mn on its dashboard.

"If there was ever a government that was open to reviewing stalled and costly technology and infrastructure projects like the pensions dashboard, this would be the government to do that,” Stevens says.

He adds that if the government does choose to lean on Gretel, “a revised and perhaps even more ambitious pensions dashboard could potentially be delivered to the public by the end of the year”.

The fintech’s name has been taken directly from the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, but unlike the abandoned heroes of the tale Stevens’ pride in his creation is associated with the memory of his father, who died the week following the fintech’s launch and whose final week was spent encouraging Stevens’ gambit. 

“He told me on the phone — he lived in Germany — not to travel over to see him because he was fine, there was nothing wrong, and we’d just launched,” he recalls.

“Fortunately I went when I did, because three days after I left him he passed away. But despite the fact that he was incredibly weak when I saw him, he did a fist pump for me when I talked to him about the early successes we were having.”

Stevens posted about his father’s death on LinkedIn to thousands of views, angered by his experience with “poor design, bureaucracy and thoughtlessness” dealing with his father’s finances after his death.

“There are so many examples of it taking months, if not years, of individuals to be able to get their money from financial institutions,” Stevens says, but he had not expected his post detailing his own struggle after his father’s death to have resonated with so many people.

Of the £50bn in assets Stevens believes is lost, around 10 per cent sits in estates, which is hard for families to track down if they cannot find the deceased person’s paperwork. 

We have a much broader solution and help people engage much earlier than a pensions dashboard would. There’s absolutely space for us to coexist if the government continues going down the path that it’s going

“It shone a new light on this for me. It was always something we’d planned to do, to have the functionality built into Gretel whereby we could help particularly vulnerable people: families who had lost loved ones, vulnerable individuals who maybe had dementia,” he says. But his experience after his father’s death made it seem more urgent.

If the government’s dashboards project does forge ahead in its current shape and form, it will by its very nature become the solution for pensions, Stevens admits. 

But Gretel’s saving grace will be its broader remit. “We have a much broader solution and help people engage much earlier than a pensions dashboard would. There’s absolutely space for us to coexist if the government continues going down the path that it’s going,” he says.

Strong appetite ‘to solve the problem today’

And there is still a strong appetite within the pensions industry to put their data with Gretel, Stevens adds, even if it is just in the short term until the dashboards is ready, because “they want to solve the problem today”.

However, the same may not hold true for similar services that focus only on pensions. “I wouldn’t want to say that they have a very limited lifespan, but I do think they will have to evolve in terms of what they do,” he warns. 

“Services like PensionBee, rather than going down the route of asking people to tell them where their pensions are located, will suddenly be able to access data that will help them fill in those gaps — but so will everybody else.”

Lots of organisations in the life and pensions space are moving fast to develop the infrastructure to connect to the government’s dashboard, “because they recognise that there is a threat to them from the outside, from the fintech community”, Stevens says.

But Gretel, shored up against the risk of being just like everybody else by catering to a wider audience than just those on the hunt for their pensions, will keep ticking over until — or if — the government’s dashboards joins the fray. 

Ellesheva Kissin in a trainee journalist at FTAdviser

 

Biog to follow