I wrote yesterday about my concern that concerns about agreed formats to help ordinary people organise their retirement income in retirement using the Pensions Dashboard were being challenged by TISA for the purposes of the financial services community.
No sooner had I complained about TISA than a second complaint is published about People’s Pension who want yet another delay to the publication of a piece of software that has been pushed back again and again to the point that a generation of savers will retire with little help in organising themselves to get their pension income remotely organised.
There is a lack of perspective here. The perception from CEO Patrick Health Lay’s comments is that the Pension Dashboard is a commercial tool to maximise the marketing advantage of rapacious pension providers.
What are the metrics that would allow ordinary people to decide on consolidation?
The answer is “investment performance”, “charges” and “customers“(sic) . This is a new VFM measurement system. A little expansion is included in an article in Corporate Pensions
So instead of a pensions dashboard that gives people a simple view of what they have and what it is likely to give as a pension income, people will get information which will be of use to the top 20% in financial illiteracy (most of whom will have advisers) but leave the rest of savers as confused as ever.
The first stage of the pension dashboard , one that should have been up and running well before COVID (2019 was the original target) would have allowed people to see what they had got. We will now get a more complex version of that which will be more complete. It will not be infallible, people will be lost due to data failures , with changes in their identity and from 2026 (hopefully) the financial press and the national press and social media will be full of stories of pension dashboard failures.
But these will relate to real problems and not the issues that commercial pension schemes (of which People’s Pension is one) complain. Although not a personal pension holder, I am a fan of Pension Bee for making ordinary people feel comfortable with the Pension the Bee manages. I am not getting paid to promote Pension Bee but I hope it does well out of the Pension Dashboard. I hope that over time it and other fintech outfits adapt to paying ordinary people pensions (a much bigger challenge for DC pensions than VFM).
Savova
For most people will not focus on their pension pots till they are at what they consider “at retirement” and those who do, need someone to look after their money till they do. Consolidating pension pots is not the same thing as getting a pension – which is what most people want.
Two people I know on the Pension Board are women a lot younger than me – Sam Seaton (lately of Money Hub) and Romi Savova of Pension Bee are architects of the Pension Dashboard.
Seaton
Let’s not push back the dashboard they have worked tirelessly these past ten years to let ordinary people see what they have got.
The pensions industry , including the commercial mastertrusts and the industry bodies representing SIPPs and Insurers must not be allowed to use “Value for Money” to paralyse the pension dashboard. It is already looking an out of date means to find what we need. Artificial Intelligence will be able to do what the Pension Dashboard does, by the end of the decade and a generation of savers will have been denied a means to see their “pots” and pensions in one place. If is time that we recognised that.
On my first meeting on dashboards (in Aviva’s Hoxton Garage in 2016) , I wrote about Heath-Lay’s speech (then for BC&E) and mentioned the then young Pension Bee and MoneyHub.
You can read me before the meeting here
You can read what I had to say after the meeting here
In 2016, Simon Kirby, Treasury MP was talking of a simple Fintech advance that would put pensions in the same progressive as banking. We were genuinely enthusiastic that Sam and Romi would be changing pensions
Kirby lost his seat, DWP took over and I bet the man at MaPS who had the job, that I’d be my pension age (then 2027) before we got a dashboard. That was 2019 and Guy Opperman laughed. What a tribute of male failure, if only we’d given to Romi and Sam,
I may well not see a dashboard till 2027 and I won’t see my State Pension till 2028. I can see why my pension is delayed , I can see only politics and bureaucracy standing between me and a dashboard. We have had four pension ministers since then.
People’s Pension is disgraceful in throwing more blocks under the wheels of the slow-moving pension dashboard. The pensions industry has been so intent on getting the details right that it has lost sight of millions that are missing their pensions and have no way to see their retirement rights in one place.
It is time that Tisa and People’s and all those who are no doubt lobbying behind the scenes for us not to get a pension dashboards in (late) 2026, were told to leave it out.
