Jo and PLSA panel give views on pensions dashboards

LPPA’s Managing Director, Jo Darbyshire, spoke at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) Annual Conference recently on a panel about the Pensions Dashboards programme.

The topic was raised during a Q & A in the conference session, Serving diverse savers, which looked at the best way to communicate with different types of savers in a pension scheme.

Jo discussed the topic with other speakers on the panel. This included Ben Piggott, Secretary to the Trustees, Defined Contribution Plan for Royal Mail, and Jessica Rigby, Director of Strategy for Evolve Pensions, a workplace pensions service provider. Alison Hatcher, CEO of HSBC Retirement Services and a Board Member of PLSA, chaired the session.

The Pensions Dashboards programme will basically allow people to securely view all their pension information online in one place. Set to go live in 2023, the idea is that it will allow people to be more engaged in their pensions and better plan for things like retirement.

You can learn more about the Pensions Dashboards programme, here.

Panel’s views and thoughts

Here are some of the views the panel gave on the Pensions Dashboards programme.

All speakers agreed it is a good idea and will provide opportunities to help people engage more with their pensions.

Jo said: ‘I think it will help people find lots of pensions – I’ve no doubt about that.’

Jessica said: ‘I feel that in time, this is a massive opportunity… If we could get people engaged in the dashboard, we could start to use that in a more unified way of getting certain messaging across.’

Ben added: ‘The pensions dashboards need to be launched as soon as possible… They will help people to value their pension. I think that will be a big step forward for the industry.’

While speaking positively about the Pensions Dashboards programme, Jo also gave her view that it may cause extra workloads for pension administrators, so more needs to be done.

She said: ‘There is the fear of the unknown because we expect it to generate a tsunami of work in what is already an incredibly busy regulatory timeframe… It’s generally a good idea to put people back in touch (with their pensions). But I think we’ve got a lot more work to do as a sector to make sure that when it lands, it lands sweetly.’