The Pension dashboard revolution

From weeks of waiting to just one minute – bring on the pension engagement revolution. 

There are three, straightforward questions that can really help people make sense of their retirement saving.   

1. What have I got? 
2. Is it enough? 
3. What can I do next? 

We started using these questions a decade ago when we were out and about talking to employers, and pension savers. We wanted these questions to be really simple and accessible to help anyone get on their retirement planning journey.  

The first question creates curiosity: how much have I got saved? Helpfully, it naturally leads on to asking whether it’s going to be enough. 

Around this same time the FCA and UK government announced that they were in discussion to “explore the most effective and efficient way to develop pension dashboards, with a view to implementation in the ‘next few years’.”  

At that time, answering ‘What have I got?’ was tricky as people struggled to think of where their past workplace pensions were, let alone how much was in them. For the most part they only had a vague idea of how much their state pension entitlement might be, and when they’d get it. 

Fast forward 10 years and things have improved remarkably. More people than ever before have pension apps and online access but when I say more people – it’s still a minority.   

Most people still couldn’t really answer that first question but if they do, at least things have improved even more as we now have the PLSA Retirement Living Standards to help people work out if they have enough and what they should be aiming for. Modern pensions schemes have apps that actually allow people to take action.   

Pension dashboards  

What’s really going to be a game changer is the Pension Dashboard, which is finally becoming a reality with the first cohort of schemes connecting up in the summer of 2025. 

But just how will it revolutionise the pension saver’s experience? 

Well let’s consider a scenario. 

Jenny is 46 years-old, has worked from age 20 and has had seven jobs to date. She has been married and divorced, and moved house five times during this period.  

For four of her job roles the company provided a DC-type pension scheme, with two offering Defined Benefit schemes. 

Like many people, Jenny hasn’t been fastidious about updating her pension details for old schemes, so how does she go about answering that first question: what have I got? 

Jenny can use the government pension tracing service to hunt down her old pensions but has to remember where she worked 20 years ago, and possibly where she was living, and what surname she was using. It is especially difficult for women who have been married and changed their name.  

Some of her pension values will be presented as a fund value and some as an income amount. She’ll also have to go to the government website to find out what state pension she is on track to get, when – and all of this is why financial advisers talk about people bringing them a ‘shoebox of shame’ stuffed full of pension documents that need to be made sense of. 

Jenny’s situation isn’t unusual as we know that many people will have, on average, more than 10 jobs over their lifetime and upwards of 27 million pension savers have multiple workplace pensions they’re no longer paying into, according to the Office for National Statistics, ONS. 

So, for Jenny to answer ‘what have I got’ – she will have a big task on her hands, contacting numerous providers, administrators and websites to receive back a host of pension policy information in different formats arriving at different times over a number of weeks. 

So how will pension dashboards help? 

From May this year the biggest pension providers start connecting to the dashboard infrastructure – with a full launch to the public in 2026.  When Jenny gets online to the dashboard (initially it will be the Money and Pension Service dashboard as this is being used as proof of concept before the commercial dashboards from the likes of Scottish Widows go live). 

She uses the government ID verification service (I’ve already set mine up at GOV.UK One Login) and after being verified, Jenny’s information request is sent to all pension providers, including the state pension and they need to respond within 60 seconds.   

In just one minute Jenny should have the answer to ‘What have I got’!  Not the weeks it might take her now – One minute.  This has the potential to revolutionise pension engagement. 

In the current model she might wait 60 seconds on the phone trying to get through to one of her old workplace pension providers – let alone have all her pension details at her fingertips at the press of a button. 

Will people engage with the pension dashboards?   

Governments creating a pension dashboard infrastructure is not new. Ten years ago, when the FCA and the government got together to kick off this programme for the UK pension dashboard delivery they were spurred on by the existence of pension dashboards in neighbouring European countries, and we can learn lots of lessons from them.  On the whole they have been very successful – and like any good digital solution they keep evolving over time to be even better for members. 

For a brilliant analysis of learns from pension dashboards – listen to our podcast with leading dashboard expert Richard Smith who travelled across Europe finding out how pension dashboards are being used, but I’ll share one of his key findings; Sweden had a government pension dashboard that was used about 70,000 times a month by the population.

When they enabled commercial pension dashboards that number jumped to an incredible three million a month – so when you see the first version of pension dashboard in the UK being delivered by Money and Pension Service and feel at all underwhelmed, don’t be disheartened. It has started the journey of making it easy for people to answer that all-important first question: what have I got?   

When providers launch their commercial dashboards at the next phase it will make it even easier, and I’m convinced we will see a full-scale pension engagement revolution. Bring it on!