The Pensions Dashboard Program (PDP) has published a call for input on their proposals for a staged timeline for connecting pension schemes to the dashboards’ ‘ecosystem’.
Currently these proposals, produced by the PDP together with regulatory and government partners, are recommendations only.
The proposals and the feedback received from the industry will be used to inform the legislation, which will ultimately mandate when pension providers will need to connect to the dashboard. The call for input will be open until 9 July 2021.
Three ‘waves’
The PDP’s recommendation is that staging should consist of three waves:
‘Memberships’ for this purpose refers to the total of all active, deferred and pensioner members in a scheme. (Note though that the dashboard is not intended to show details of pensions in payment.)
Wave one is estimated to account for 99% of the memberships in scope for the program.
Three ‘cohorts’
The proposal is that wave one would begin in April 2023 and would run for up to two years.
Within the first wave, the PDP suggest that the onboarding is further split into three cohorts:
Wave two would be scheduled to commence once the bulk of schemes in wave one had connected, likely sometime in 2024.
What will pension providers have to do?
By the time it is staged, a pension provider will need to be connected to the dashboard ecosystem, which means being ready to receive ‘find’ requests from dashboards, undertake matching processes to locate a saver’s pension, register found pensions and supply pension savings information to be viewable (temporarily) to dashboard users (no pensions information will be stored on the dashboard itself).
Capita comment
Trustees will wish to identify the wave/cohort that their scheme would fall under to get an idea of the provisional timescale which would apply to them.
At the heart of the dashboard program is the need for scheme data to be as complete and accurate as it possibly can be. Quality data will be essential for connecting to the dashboard ecosystem and ensuring that members are presented with the right information. This might therefore be an appropriate time to refresh your knowledge with the PDP’s overview of data standards, or even to review their data standards guide (which we explain in Spotlight 2020/11).
We would recommend that you get in touch with your usual Capita contact to discuss what actions are available and appropriate for your scheme to improve the quality of your data.