The first designs of the upcoming pensions dashboards have been unveiled to the pensions industry.

The images showed an individual submitting their name, address, date of birth and National Insurance number to search for their pensions. This reveals the total value and monthly income of each pension (grouped under ‘defined benefit pensions’ and ‘defined contribution pensions’), along with their monthly state pension. The information is summarised at the top of the page with the total number of pensions found and total monthly pension income at retirement.

However, the designs were ‘high level proof of concept’ with the final dashboards expected to include ‘significantly more data’.

The pensions dashboards concept design was revealed for the first time at an industry event during the Pensions Age/ITM seminar Data- weathering the perfect data storm on Friday 7 April by HM Treasury Pension Dashboard Steering Group independent member and Finance & Technology Research Centre director Ian McKenna.

“What we have built so far is prototype technology that proves that you can take a relatively limited amount of information and identify all the pensions schemes that someone has ever been a member of,” McKenna said.

“The next step is to work on the user interfaces, the member-facing part… which will be diverse in their nature, depending on what different organisations want to present.”

According to McKenna, multiple dashboards will “encourage a full consistency of organisations to bring forward dashboards, to encourage competition, to encourage innovation”.

The next stage will also be ensuring that dashboards are “not just about numbers” but incorporating other facts people will need to understand their savings. “How to make sure nobody goes to the dashboard and looks at some numbers and does something that will achieve poor outcomes,” McKenna explains.

The requirement for the industry to create a pensions dashboard was announced in March 2016 Budget documents. Its aim is to enable people to access all of their pension savings from different schemes and providers, along with their state pension, in one place of their choosing.

The dashboards prototype was delivered on time to government ministers on 31 March 2017.

The cross-industry group, led by the Association of British Insurers successfully managed around 80 people from 17 pension firms and six technology companies, as well as government regulators and industry experts, to create the dashboards prototype.

The companies that contributed to the project include: Abbey Life, Aon, Aviva, Fidelity International, HSBC, Legal & General, Lloyds Banking Group (Scottish Widows), LV=, NEST, NOW: Pensions, Phoenix, Prudential, Royal London, Standard Life, The People’s Pension, Willis Towers Watson and Zurich.

In addition, firms providing technological resources in the prototype's development were Aquila Heywood, Experian, ITM, Origo, Runpath and Safran.

The Treasury, in association with Aviva and the Association of British Insurers, will showcase the prototype technology at the Aviva Digital Garage on Wednesday 12 April.

The government expects the dashboards service to be launched by 2019.

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