The Pensions Dashboards Programme has highlighted the importance of digital identities in an increasingly online world, said Digidentity senior business development manager Jonathan Evans. Schemes that get their data in order will find the process of data matching far smoother when the dashboards go live.
“Time spent now getting data cleansed and kept up to date will reap dividends when dashboards go live,” Evans added.
TransUnion director of diversified markets Adam Gillott said: “Harnessing credit data from information providers makes it possible to create a single customer view by tracing the same identity across multiple policies, even where circumstances such as name or address have changed over time.
“This aligns with the aim of the new dashboards, so that it’s possible to consolidate various pension schemes in one easy-to-use place.”
Time is on schemes’ side
Pensions Administration Standards Association chair Kim Gubler suggested that the figures identified by the research sounded quite low and might apply to an employer working at their data, and such discrepancies might be caught up by the next benefit statement.
“However, there’s a difference between data you need for running a pension scheme and running a dashboard,” she added.
“Dashboards not only require lots more data, but high-quality data and you need to be certain that data is accurate. With the delay to the dashboards programme, there’s time to do something about that.”
Nick Meredith, products director at Equisoft, a dashboard identity service provider, agreed that the delay to the dashboards project provides a perfect opportunity for schemes to do some housekeeping of their member data.
“I don’t think that the dashboards is going to be a disaster for a great many schemes. But unless schemes check now, they won’t know until it’s too late,” he said.
Pádraig Floyd is interim editor of Pensions Expert
