A plan to build a prototype of the Pensions dashboard by March 2017 is now underway in an effort for pensions to “catch up” with the “revolutionary” mobile banking sectors.

Economic Secretary Simon Kirby said people should be able to review pension balances online as part of online banking, change how they save in a pension at the click of a button or have personalised pension forecasts running on a mobile app, and a pensions dashboard could “unleash this kind of potential”.

Aviva, Aon, B&CE, HSBC, LV, Nest, Now: Pensions, Royal London, Standard Life, Willis Towers Watson and Zurich have agreed to work together to build a first working prototype of the dashboard. The ABI has agreed to project manage the whole process.

“For it to really be effective, I think there are three main principles that must underpin its whole design,” Kirby stated.

“Firstly, it will need to be open. No single dashboard can meet the needs of millions of people who all have very different individual circumstances. There is definitely no government website that could do that either. There is no monopoly of wisdom. The dashboard needs to be an infrastructure of open standards – like a common language and system for finding, collating, and sharing pension information.

“And it should be open to a range of companies who can meet basic standards of security and data protection – including banks and fintechs, not just pension providers. They should be able to access its information to deliver the products or advice their customers ask for.

Secondly, the dashboard needs to be flexible. It is unrealistic to expect every provider to be ready to contribute the same data to the dashboard at the same time. It is probably impossible to present all the different types of pensions in exactly the same way. And who knows how technology or other changes might transform pensions in the future? The infrastructure therefore needs to be built in such a way that it can adapt and expand over time.”

The dashboard cannot be a "single, monolithic platform set in stone forever", Kirby said, and needs to be reliable.

“If we want to encourage people to save more, then they need to be able to trust in pensions. That starts with people being able to access basic information, across all their pension pots, without having to pay to do so.

“There’s nothing wrong with charging for useful services – be it advice, savings plans, consolidation services or other possibilities that don’t yet exist. But we need to get the free provision of the basic information right, and make sure it’s consistent across different types of pensions.”

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