The Pensions Dashboard

What is ‘The Pensions Dashboard’?

The Pensions Dashboard is a platform that lets savers see all their pension pots in one place.

Why is it needed?

According to Which?, almost half of over 50s don’t know the value of their pension while as much as 21% of savers have never even checked how much they’ve saved in their pension.

On average, a person can have 11 employers over their working life and currently there is no way for people to see the value of all of their pensions in one place. As such people approaching retirement find it difficult to keep track of their pension pots.

The Pensions Dashboard aims to provide a link to “lost” pension pots with previous employers to help release the £millions worth of pensions savings currently unclaimed

Who has signed up to the dashboard?

The full list of contributing firms is:

• Abbey Life
• Aon
• Aviva
• Fidelity International
• HSBC
• Legal & General
• Lloyds Banking Group (Scottish Widows)
• LV=
• NEST
• NOW: Pensions
• Phoenix
• Prudential
• Royal London
• Standard Life
• The People’s Pension (B&CE)
• Willis Towers Watson
• Zurich

The DWP will be ensuring that the State Pension will also be included and it is likely more major pension providers will sign up to the dashboard over the course of the coming months.

It is also expected that final salary schemes (Defined Benefit) will also be included, not just money purchase (or Defined Contribution) pensions.

When will the Dashboard be up and running?

A prototype should be ready for testing by March 2017, with the prototype project completing in May.

The goal is for the dashboard to be fully ready for public use in 2019 in a single online place of their choice.

Laws and tax rules may change in the future. The information here is based on our understanding in January 2017. The information in this blog or any response to comments should not be regarded as financial advice.