LCP has clubbed up with Transunion, the credit checker and Digidentity the digital identity verifier to work out better ways to get scheme data ready for buy-out and/or display on pension dashboards. It is also pretty important in paying them!

In a webinar , attended by LCP clients and the odd enthusiast (me) , we learned a lot, not just about how to get data ready, but how being on the dashboard will make data better. Indeed, one attendee asked whether it might be best to leave data cleansing to the dashboard.

This was of course the wrong question as we have still no certainty of when we have a dashboard, if we have a dashboard and it ignores the need for schemes to be ready for buyout and to pay its members’ claims.

Due to technical problems, Transunion’s sales guy couldn’t make it , so Steve Webb turned his hand to promoting the work of credit checkers who , like Experian and Equifax – seem to know everyone. Steve Webb is , inter-alia , a born salesman.

They also know more about us than we do. They are horribly well informed.

Which makes them ideal partners if you are keen on knowing your customer, or in the case of the pension dashboard, knowing your customer’s pension rights.

With some aplomb, the former Pensions Minister explained the capabilities of  credit checkers to recognize your savers, work out where they link and retrieve the key data needed to show savers their pots and pensions.

Creating the Data DNA for each person establishes a trust framework going forward

And it means that for users and service providers, business can carry on without constant reverification needing to take place. This leads to happy users and easy user journeys.

We moved on to look at how someone could verify themselves digitally 

There is a great difference between self-asserted data (which is what  individuals say about themselves) and what is validated (where the data is verified). Individuals can match themselves with their pensions but they need to validated for being who they are, before they can see it.

This leads to the results of survey work carried out on the actual data of an LCP client.

The test threw up certain status’ of the member records

And these divided up as follows

and the data was further analyzed to compare those still working for the sponsoring employer and those who had left

and here comes the most exciting insight of the presentation. Once verification has happened, using the information available to Transunion, the missing detail on member records become evident , using the interoperability of the various data sources available to the dashboard.

The other data sources include the Post Office Address File. Using this data source, the member data improves in quality with usage.

The key findings  of the seminar were that matching and verification can be improved by partnering with firms who have bigger and better data sets than pension scheme administrators.

Recognizing that working outside the narrow confines of pensions data administration to find answers to the issues of “data decay” that led to almost a  third of data analyzed not “living as stated”, is important.

LCP has done the pensions industry a favor , not just in researching options but in bringing in external data experts and sharing the findings.

The Pension Playpen will be hearing from Chris Curry of the Pension Dashboard Program on dashboard program and I hope we will be able to discuss this initiative. Our conversation is on Tuesday 28th March at 10.30 am. You can join via http://www.pensionplaypen.com.

LCP has published a paper that lays out the work discussed in this paper in more detail. You can access it here.

You can now watch the seminar on demand from this link