UK pension dashboards won’t have depth and sophistication of the Swedish dashboard, and are not expected to launch on time, given the vast amount of data necessary from numerous pension providers.
Speaking at the Corporate Adviser Summit, MinPension.se CEO Anders Lundström stressed that the failure to meet the dashboard deadline in the UK will more likely be a result of a shortage of data rather than an issue with the dashboard itself.
He questions the UK’s pensions infrastructure and the existence of communication and information standards in the sector.
One of the essential components that have contributed to the success of MinPension.se, the Swedish Pensions dashboard which covers 99.8% of the Swedish market, according to Lundström is data. He says there was a realisation of a “catch-22” while creating the dashboard, where it was apparent that “- if we didn’t have any users then we didn’t have pension providers providing us with data and if we didn’t have the providers providing us with data then we didn’t get any users.”
MinPension.se was first introduced in 2004 but after realising that MinPension.se was not living up to user expectations, 95% of the dashboard was abandoned according to Lundström, and the platform was redesigned a year later using real data and user testing which improved user experience.
The Swedish pensions dashboard has a number of components that enable users to visualise their pension with breaking points, calculate taxes, drill down features at the policy level, and simulate various scenarios for retirement age and withdrawal options. Users can choose from and view up to 99 scenarios on the website, along with default options.
Lundström says that the UK pensions industry must decide what it intends for dashboards to achieve, noting that the UK is a different market than Sweden and so has different requirements.
