The INSURTECH Book

The Potential of a Pension Dashboard Infrastructure for UK Pension Savers

By Yvonne Braun

Director of Long Term Savings, ABI

Voice-controlled, AI-enabled technology is fundamentally reshaping our experiences of shopping, entertainment, consuming information, and using financial services.¹ The UK FinTech industry is one of the most innovative in the world, and seen by government as an important part of building a highly-skilled, highly-productive economy, and helping consumers make full use of their own data.²

Yet this wave of innovation and open data seems largely absent from retirement savings. Of course, some pension companies have developed snazzy apps, such as MyAviva, to pick just one example, making it much more straightforward for their customers to get up-to-date information about their pension savings and offering useful tools to help with decision-making. But much customer interaction in the pension space is still paper-based, particularly in the world of trust-based and defined benefit (final salary) pension schemes.

This was not necessarily a problem in a world where people spent decades in a job, and where final salary schemes were the norm for many workers. Back then, a worker could retire in one month, receive their last pay slip, and receive their first final salary pension payment the next month, with virtually no need to engage with the process. But the labour market in the UK has changed fundamentally over recent decades. Outside the public sector, defined ...