As calls to roll out pension dashboards sooner rather than later grow louder, pension schemes have said that the ability to successfully match members with pensions via the dashboard is now their biggest concern.
Pension scheme members will be able to view all their pensions online, in one place, when dashboards are rolled out. However, to do that members will need to input their pension data so the schemes can use it to search their records and determine whether there is a pension ‘match’.
Concerns over this process and data quality have come to light in a webinar survey from specialist pension law firm Sacker & Partners.
It found that 26 percent of schemes are concerned about ensuring the matching process goes smoothly, while slightly less (25 percent) are concerned about the accuracy of DB value data.
‘Challenging workstream’
Sackers said this is a significant change from 2022 when the same question was asked and 40 percent of respondents said they were concerned about providing accurate DB value data, while data matching garnered 19 percent.
Emily Forrest, partner at Sackers (pictured), said: “Dashboards have become the hot topic of the summer, with schemes and their administrators needing to mobilise at pace to get ready for connection. For many schemes, the DWP’s guidance will mean connecting in 2025.”
She said it was not a huge surprise that DB value data has been overtaken by matching as the biggest concern for schemes.
“It probably reflects the fact that schemes have started taking action and are seeing first-hand how challenging the data matching workstream will be,” she said.
Matching data
“Legislation does not dictate what matching criteria should be, rather it is for trustees to decide their own matching policy and which data fields to use for matching purposes. Matching criteria have to be right for each scheme and trustees can only take this decision once they understand how confident they can be in their scheme data and its ability to deliver accurate matching.”
Forrest continued: “We expect matching to be one of the most high-stakes aspects of dashboards when they go live, with schemes likely to receive millions of ‘find requests’ in the first few months after launch.
“Improving data quality and fully understanding the decisions about matching need to be a priority within schemes’ dashboards projects.”
From here to connection
She said: “Trustees should be setting the governance framework now for getting from here to connection and beyond. Trustees will be expected to have a firm handle on all the decisions they’ve made along the way and maintain a clear audit trail, including their decisions around matching.
“We would encourage schemes to consider having a delegated working group to take some of the burden. Engage with your administrators. Get on top of data cleansing and work out your matching criteria, and don’t forget the background elements such as updating your privacy notice to cover dashboards, data protection impact assessments and cyber security policies, as these are often elements that can get overlooked in large scale projects.”
