LONDON, January 31, 2023 – With fewer than 150 working days left until the first pensions dashboard connection deadline, a poll by WTW shows that many pension schemes are still anticipating difficulties in meeting the challenges of their dashboard launch.
The poll of 100 pension scheme trustees and in-house pensions managers showed that, while three-quarters (76%) of schemes are confident they will be compliant with their dashboard duties in time for their connection deadline, only 5% are expecting to be able to provide pensions value data for all members at launch. The same poll showed that around half (46%) of schemes expect value data to be available for up to 90% of members, and a fifth (21%) of schemes don’t yet know what level of member coverage they will be able to achieve.
The poll also revealed anxiety around how pension schemes will cope with the increase in member enquiries anticipated once dashboards have launched. Less than half (48%) of those surveyed were confident that their scheme would be able to manage the increase in enquiries, while over a third (35%) anticipate that their scheme will have difficulty coping with the higher volume.
“Understanding a scheme’s design and the quality of its data is key as most of the challenges and enquiries that schemes will face will be data related.”
Geraldine Brassett | WTW
Geraldine Brassett, Director, Outsourcing (Pension Solutions), WTW, said: “Pension schemes know there is still a lot of work to do to prepare for the launch of dashboards, but there are steps they can take to minimise disruption and increase success for members.
“Understanding a scheme’s design and the quality of its data is key as most of the challenges and enquiries that schemes will face will be data related. Most schemes can expect an ‘80:20’ experience of implementation, where roughly 80% of members will be straight-forward to onboard, but around 20% are likely to be more complex. This may be due to legacy issues such as equalisation or underpins or be at a member level, including one-off benefit promises, late retirement terms or pension sharing orders.
“Understanding these different considerations at scheme, category, section, or member level is key to ensuring data is correctly configured for members and that they see the right information when they log in to a dashboard.
“We know that pensions data can be imperfect but the actions we take now to understand and resolve data issues will help to give members the confidence in dashboards. I would urge all pension schemes to work closely with their administrators and providers to help iron out their data challenges in advance of dashboards becoming available to members.”
*WTW polled 100 pension scheme trustees and in-house pension scheme managers and directors on 17 January 2023 as part of its ‘Pensions dashboards: What should you be doing now? webcast. A recording of the webcast is available here.
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