Seven out of the 14 remaining voluntary participants (VPs) are “very close” to finishing their connection journey to the pensions dashboard ecosystem, including the state pension team, Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) principal, Chris Curry, has confirmed.

Speaking at the Pensions Age Northern Conference, Curry said these participants are past the "most complex part of the journey", which is the integration testing, and are finishing off the final protocols.

Additionally, Curry said he was “delighted” that the state pension team is one of these seven volunteer participants.

“They have now proved their connection, they have fully integrated and are now just going through the final parts of that,” he said.

“So, it's not going to be very long at all before that state pension will be able to be seen through the architecture for pension dashboards.”

This builds on news from Curry last week at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association’s Local Authority Conference, when he confirmed that six volunteer participants were past the most "tricky part" of integration.

He also confirmed that the PDP will announce exactly how it will conduct the MoneyHelper dashboard consumer testing strategy in the “coming weeks”.

Curry explained that the testing will start with very low volumes in a moderated environment, with very close monitoring and people being helped through the pension dashboards.

He said that after a few months, the testing will be open to unmoderated testing.

“Potentially, by the end of the year there will be thousands of individuals each month, testing the pension dashboard and us collating the results, and feeding that into the process to determining whether we can launch pension dashboards,” he said.

Curry called this “really exciting”, suggesting that people seeing their own data will be a “real step forward”.

According to Curry, assuming testing goes well, the testing period should come to an end in about nine months (March 2026).  

However, he stated: “Testing will always continue. I think it's never going to stop, but we'll be in a position where we'll be able to say, we think there's enough positive here to be able to do something.

“That is when we get into how much time we need to give the industry to get ready for this and how much information we can give them.

“It's not just testing for MoneyHelper, it's also testing to try and understand what the behavioural response is going to be so we can help the industry prepare for what's likely to come after that.

“So, there's a whole host of different factors in there, which make it really difficult to pin down.”

However, he said when the MoneyHelper dashboard launch date is announced, “it shouldn't be a surprise” as the PDP is looking to be “really transparent” with what it is doing in testing and over the rest of the year, so the industry will know how the tests are going.

“But I should think by the time we get towards the end of the year, we'll be getting much closer to having a much clearer idea of how the testing's gone or testing we've got left to do, what we think the industry is going to need to do to prepare," he said.

"Then we can start maybe being a bit more certain about roughly when it is likely to launch."

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