Pensions dashboard prototype

In 2016, a coalition of businesses from the pensions industry collaborated with the Government, regulators, and technology companies to develop a prototype for pension dashboards. This initiative aimed to explore the necessary rules and regulations to make these dashboards a reality.

The prototype project successfully designed and developed the underlying technology, which will eventually help individuals locate all their pension savings across over 60 million pension pots, including details about their State Pension.

The prototype’s customer journey consists of four steps

Identity verification

The user’s identity is verified through a secure process like gov.uk/verify, which already provides online access to information like State Pension details and tax returns

Permission granting

The user clicks a box to officially grant the dashboard permission to share their information with multiple pension schemes and providers, or a third-party connection they might be using.

Information retrieval

Queries are sent to various pension schemes and providers to locate pension pots that match the personal details provided, including the State Pension.

Consolidated reporting

The system compiles and displays all the identified pensions on a single page, showing the names of the schemes and their estimated value at a specific retirement age. An estimated combined monthly or annual income in retirement is also provided at the top. This process typically takes only a few seconds.

Additionally, the dashboards will allow users to click on each pension pot to access more detailed information about their savings and view contact details for each scheme.

The proposed pensions dashboard system does not involve creating a large store of pensions data. Instead, it fetches and delivers the relevant information upon request.

Not all pension providers need to connect directly to the dashboard system. They may opt to connect via another service that will manage their data on their behalf.