Making connection to the Pensions Dashboards provider friendly

Anthony Rafferty, CEO, Origo, comments on Origo's latest service to help providers connect to the Pensions Dashboards:

Origo has been passionate about the pensions dashboards initiative since it was announced in 2015. As part of the industry’s preparations, we developed a working prototype of the pensions finder service back in 2016.

We were delighted therefore when last year, in partnership with Capgemini, Origo was selected by the Pensions Dashboards Programme to provide the pension finder service and the consent and authorisation service, two core elements of the digital architecture that will make pensions dashboards work.

These elements will enable individuals using a pensions dashboard to securely provide the consent to find their pensions, and to control who can access their data.

The final piece of the jigsaw is securely connecting multiple dashboard providers and all the data providers (i.e., pension providers, schemes and their administrators) to the central digital architecture. Origo is providing the underlying security management features, known as a public key infrastructure, which will ensure that only trusted organisations can connect to the pensions dashboards ecosystem.

Legislation and regulation compel data providers to participate in the pensions dashboards initiative, and there is undoubtedly a huge challenge for the industry to connect en masse. So, as well as developing the core elements of the central infrastructure, it made sense for us to use all our experience and expertise to help companies connect to the central digital architecture. We’ve created an “ISP” (Integrated Service Provider) service, the Origo Dashboard Connector that provides a safe, cost-effective and easy connection to the ecosystem.

Our aim is to make the process of connecting to the pensions dashboards’ central digital architecture as easy and painless as possible and even more importantly, to give providers a choice as to how they connect, how much of our service they wish to use, and how much to do themselves. Which is why we developed three ways for providers to use the Origo Dashboard Connector.

Here’s how it works

The Origo Dashboard Connector provides three distinct types of service. The first, Connect, securely links a pension provider to the pensions dashboard central digital architecture. Origo takes care of the complex security interactions ensuring that the pension provider is fully compliant with all the connectivity and SLA requirements of the ecosystem. We quickly respond to consumers’ pension data requests and deliver their pensions data 24/7, 365 days of the year.

The second part of the service, Find, responds to a citizen’s request to know if a company has a policy in their name. This can be customised to meet each provider’s individual data matching preferences. Using the Find service means that pension providers don’t have to scale up their technology operations to handle potentially many millions of policy holder finds and matches.

The third and final element of the service, View, holds all the pension data necessary to completely fulfil a citizen’s request and makes the data available to the dashboard and ultimately the citizen themselves. Over time, the volume of requests for data is expected to grow considerably and the Origo Dashboard Connector has been built with this in mind – to allow these requests to be serviced securely, efficiently and in a very cost-effective manner for pension providers and administrators.

Where data is held by the Origo Dashboard Connector to support the Find and View operations, it is fully segregated from other customer data, following all security best practices and using world class technology platforms.

Providers can choose whether they want simply to Connect to the pensions dashboard, add the Find service, or add the Find and the View services – a fully managed service.

With the fully managed service, when a request comes in, the Origo Dashboard Connector will deal with it in full without any input from the provider. The pension provider has only to regularly update the data available to the Connector. In a nutshell, it takes away the technology and the resource issues for providers and helps them deliver on their legislative requirements cheaper, faster and with less risk.

At the end of the day, the Origo Dashboard Connector does what it says on the tin – in the best way possible, based on over six years of experience Origo has of working in this area of the market and our 30 plus years of delivering efficiency boosting and cost-reducing technology to the industry.

We’re passionate about doing right by our customers, delivering great service and providing quality solutions like the Origo Dashboard Connector that help them deliver world-class services for their own customers. Our whole team is dedicated to delivering this vital initiative in the best way possible to millions of UK citizens, and we look forward to the good that it will do.

Find out more about Origo Dashboard Connector.