With just under eight months to go until the first deadline to connect to the pensions dashboards’ ecosystem, find out what challenges the industry is grappling with as the race to connect gathers paces.
As we prepare for the return of Pensions Dashboards Week later this month (23-27 Sep), we sat down with one of our speakers, Jamie Jenkins, Director of Policy & Communications at Royal London (pictured below), to discuss how he thinks dashboards will change the pensions industry and challenge long held processes.
How do you see pensions dashboards changing the future of the industry?
Jamie Jenkins (JJ): “Pensions dashboards will be a major catalyst in digitalising the retirement landscape, offering much greater online access to modern schemes, but also bringing older pension policies online. It will allow people to trace lost pension pots, and hopefully lead to a much greater level of engagement for people in their retirement plans.”
What do you think are the greatest opportunities pensions dashboards will deliver to the pensions industry?
JJ: “The connectivity of dashboards and the consistency of data exchange should lead to a much more seamless process for customers, speeding up people’s ability to assess their retirement prospects and consolidate pensions where appropriate. Pension providers and advisers can then hopefully spend more time on value added services and less time on data collection.”
What are the challenges/barriers the pensions industry will have to face on the path to mainstream adoption of pensions dashboards?
JJ: “The work to develop pensions dashboards has faced a number of setbacks but is now on track to deliver in line with the new timetable. The biggest challenge is one of focus, with policymakers introducing several other, data-led initiatives in recent years, most notably those designed to encourage consolidation of small pots. Pensions dashboards should be central to this agenda, and it’s crucial that we don’t dilute attention on delivering this.”
If you could ask the new pensions minister for one thing – what would it be?
JJ: “Maintain the focus on delivery of pensions dashboards and make this central to other initiatives, setting out a bolder ambition for how the technology can be used to improve people’s retirement planning in future.”
Jamie Jenkins will be speaking during Thursday’s session (Pensions Continuity in an Uncertain World, 10am, 26th Sep) at Pensions Dashboards Week, alongside Chris Curry, Pensions Dashboards Programme; Louise Davey, the Pensions Regulator; and Bravura’s Propositions Lead Jonathan Hawkins.
If you haven’t signed up to any of the events we are running throughout the week, you can see all the sessions and register for your free place here.
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