Pensions Dashboard

SnowMan

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82146936#Comment_82146936

There is a balance to be struck between providing an overview of someone's pensions and duplicating the functionality of all the participants' own systems.

Couldn't agree more. Personally I would have veered towards a list of pensions and contacts and possibly some indication of dates of contributions/membership, with a possible marker if the pension was below a certain small size. And then the individual (or executor) could get proper information from the individual providers.

They could have had a tool where individuals having found out their pension values or defined benefit pension amounts from their providers could enter them into the system itself to allow them to use some planning tools. At least they would then be doing that with full knowledge of the pension and its features rather than a potentially misleading or in some cases meaningless single figure value or amount.

Edit: And just to add the quality of information given by pension providers is absolutely appalling so resource might have been better spent improving that. Providers are subject to onerous sometimes sensible, often bureaucratic requirements from the likes of the FCA in how they present information. But providers are also guilty of making things completely unintelligible for the average person. Within a pension statement typically multiple pages long you will find statements like 'your pension may have an important guaranteed annuity rate' and if so this applies. The provider should be forced to say whether there is actually a guaranteed annuity rate or not.

otb666

I logged in to gov uk one had a list of 57 things I could do but no pension dashboard

flaneurs_lobster

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82147036#Comment_82147036

That's because it's not yet a 'live' service.

You need to access via the links at the top of this thread.

hugheskevi

My Dashboard view had my State Pension, my DC pension, but was missing my Civil Service DB pension. The figures are all correct aside from an employment end date for the DC pension which makes no difference to the figures. I thought the layout was quite nice. It was striking how the focus was primarily on the income a DC pot might provide rather than the pot value, although the pot value was readily available from the headline information with a single click from the main summary.

The assumptions that the DC pot will not have any lump sum taken and will be used to purchase a non-escalating annuity are the most significant assumptions. In particular, these key assumptions are not clearly set out which I think should change, as those relying on them might be surprised if they don't engage with the detail.

State Pension is shown as a monthly amount, and it seems to take the weekly entitlement, multiply that by 365.25 / 7, and divide the result by 12. After everything being reported in weekly terms to date, it was a bit strange to see a monthly amount and then back-calculate the figure to verify it. It would be good to see the weekly amount far more prominently (it is shown in a sub-menu) to make validation against known figures more straightforward.

The HM Government logo is used for State Pension, but no logos for private sector providers. I would prefer those logos included for the big providers as I think it would improve familiarity and give consistency of appearance. Small detail though.

For me, the Dashboard was mildly interesting, but something I'd look at once for 15 minutes and then never return to it. It is hard for me to evaluate given I am far from the target audience.

cloud_dog

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82146970#Comment_82146970

If all it does is (accurately; dependant on providers) list all the unclaimed pensions for people to know and follow up with, then that will be a huge benefit for people.

StewedApple

There doesn't appear to be any mechanism for downloading the data in a summary format either (CSV, XML, JASON, PDF etc.). Currently, all I could see was that you were required to click on a pension, drill down, and then navigate back to the main menu and then rinse and repeat.

This may be adequate if you have only one or two pensions but many people are likely to have more - which means the need for you to manually record data elsewhere (assuming you do this accurately) multiple times.

Further if the data is then subsequently updated there doesn't appear to be any mechanism to advise that it's been updated since the last login which means each site visit will require about 5-6 interactions per pension to establish the data and whether that data has been amended or not.

Perhaps I missed this menu option - happy to be corrected.

snowlaser

Although people have a lot of gripes with what's showing so far i think it needs to be re-iterated that it's only a beta test version: many schemes have a 30 September 2026 connection date so haven't even been asked to upload information until next week.

hyubh

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82146773#Comment_82146773

'Does seem very confusing about what pensions will be shown on the dashboard and which ones won't'

Surely the headline principle is simple? If in payment, then it isn't shown, if it isn't in payment, it is. For sure there are edge cases (another not mentioned so far is DB flexible retirements).

'if there are in practice no usable reference numbers (see WH69's post) for possible matches then if someone with a possible match contacts a scheme will they be able to tie up which record the possible match is with?' - yes, there's an internal identifier shared between dashboard and scheme. This identifier goes stale after 30 days.

If a negative match is confirmed, this fed back to the dashboard so that the same possible match doesn't reoccur when the user next makes a find request.

'And it sounds like because of the way one log in works, executors or prospective executors won't have access to the dashboard.'

Correct, it isn't (yet) for that. I'm not sure not doing everything makes the whole project pointless though...? Making the perfect the enemy of the good and all that...'

'I'm not underestimating the difficulty of all this but it does seem like a mess from what I read above.'

Tough crowd, if there any limitations then it's a 'mess'...

hyubh

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82147204#Comment_82147204

On your second point, the dashboard queries schemes for data dynamically (i e. it doesn't store anything). 'Last modified' dates aren't part of the data collected, I suppose the issue is that not all schemes might have this field easy at hand (if at all).

NoMore

The current implementation is probably not aimed at some of the posters on this thread.

It's intended to be simple and give people an idea of their possible income in retirement from their current pension and possibly prompting them on 'missing' pensions. I am not commenting on how successful it is in these aims.

Once all the data connections are setup and all schemes are familiar with the data required, the idea is to open this up to the private sector to allow them to develop their own dashboards, at that point I would expect some of the suggestions that may be deemed not suitable for this rendition will probably start to be developed.