More details have emerged of the planned comparison site online pensions marketplace to help citizens get a full picture of their retirement cash within three years
"I’m confident that when it comes to 2019, people in this country will have a much better service when it comes to making the right decisions about their pensions,” Economic Secretary to the Treasury Simon Kirby (pictured) said yesterday at a launch event for the Dashboard in London.
Kirby told attendees that the site will be based as far as possible on open standards, and will be flexible and reliable.
The Government is now working with the pensions sector to test these ideas via a ‘working prototype’ to be up and running by next March, two years ahead of the current go-live date of sometime in 2019.
Eleven of the UK’s pension providers have signed up to help populate that prototype. These are Aviva, Aon, B&CE, HSBC, LV, Nest, Now:Pensions, Royal London, Standard Life, Willis Towers Watson, and Zurich, with the pension industry trade body the Association of British Insurers stepping in to project manage the work.
Details of citizens’ state pension will also be available via the site, he said.
Kirby said that the Treasury will back the project so as to help ensure “people have the right information, in the right format, at the right time” when it comes to pensions: “If we have better information available, we can make much more effective decisions, from choosing how much we save, to what products we use to do so.
“What the dashboard can do is unlock a huge amount of information to inform the choices people make,” he promised, suggesting that the tool could allow users to review their current private pension portfolio as easily as they check their current account balance.
Image from GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0
