Govt’s confirmed Dashboards commitment highlights connection priority, says fintech

The Government’s confirmation this week of its commitment to the Pensions Dashboard re-emphasises the priority need for pensions providers and administrators to address how and when they will connect to the Pensions Dashboard’s central digital infrastructure, and to do so sooner rather than later, says Origo.

The fintech says the talk by Pensions Minister Emma Reynolds at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association’s (PLSA) annual conference in Liverpool this week, confirmed that the Government was determined to press ahead with “this vital innovation”, and bring “huge benefits to millions of people who currently find it so difficult and so complex to navigate their own pension savings”.

Anthony Rafferty, CEO Origo commented: “All mid-large pension providers and schemes need now to be finalising how and when they will connect to the Pensions Dashboards’ central digital infrastructure.

“The closer we get to the onboarding dates for different sizes of organisation, the more we envisage that, despite the scheduling of connections, there are likely to be ISP resource bottlenecks. We would urge organisations to connect sooner rather than later, to prepare in advance for onboarding and ensure they have a seamless connection to the Pension Dashboard from day one.”

Rafferty said they are five key points any ISP must meet:

• Be built and tested to current PDP standards and be able to quickly upgrade as updates to the standards become available.
• Have elastic scale, enabling it to handle high volumes as well as significant spikes of Find requests per day after the Dashboard Available Point.
• Be able to meet the scale challenge, which will require ISPs to handle high volumes of View requests per day as people view their pension data more often.
• Have in place a reliable process for where there is a partial match, for example where the surname, date of birth and postcode match but the national insurance number is different, in order to deal with the issue swiftly and accurately.
• Importantly, all data should be both secure and segregated, rather than pooled with other providers’/ schemes’pension data.

Last month Origo announced the launch of its ODC Matching ToolKit, a standalone service that both integrates with the Origo’s ISP, the Origo Dashboard Connector (ODC) service, and can be used as an independent tool for providers to test their ability to match individual’s Find requests received via pensions dashboards.

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