Respondents to the pensions dashboards standards consultation have warned that user testing and experience will be required before a full assessment can be provided.

The Department for Work and Pensions intends for the dashboards’ legislative framework to come into force from April 2023. The Pensions Dashboards Programme’s consultation, launched on July 19, sought input from the pensions industry on areas including operational, security and design standards.

The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association and the Society of Pension Professionals were among respondents to the consultation, which closed on August 30.

The PLSA welcomed the clarity offered by the PDP’s standards but lamented that the consultation did not run for at least eight weeks over the summer, which the body said would have helped organisations to provide fuller feedback.

The SPP, meanwhile, said that “the solutions being proposed largely seem reasonable”, but added that until they are tested “using real data and structures, it is not possible to say for certain whether they are the best solution or not”.

The market is only just emerging
Efforts have been made to incorporate the views of the industry throughout the dashboards’ development process.

In July, the DWP was told by respondents to its own consultation that the timeline for making the initiative accessible to the public is too short. There will be a 90-day period between the point at which the dashboards will be available to the public — known as the “dashboards available point” — and their announcement.

While welcoming the standards, the PLSA told the PDP: “We would have preferred them to have been developed after extensive user testing, with real connected pension schemes, to achieve balance between a good, comprehensible user experience and what is technically feasible and not onerous to data providers.

“Our main concern, and that of our members, is that many of the questions are best answered by an [integrated service provider] market that is only just emerging and [qualifying pensions dashboard services] that do not currently exist.

“Pension schemes have only just started to engage with ISPs and not all have had discussions at the level of detail to know if these standards are set at the right level.”

The PLSA warned that there are “still many” parts of the dashboards’ lower-level design that have yet to be finalised.

Large schemes will be the first of three staging cohorts, connecting to the dashboards’ digital architecture between April 2023 and September 2024.

They will then be followed by medium schemes throughout October 2024 to October 2025, with small and micro schemes expected to connect from 2026.

For the first cohort of dashboard providers, “not having finalised standards until late 2022 could place a significant risk of schemes’ ability to implement a solution in a controlled fashion”, the PLSA cautioned.

View request response time is ‘too tight’
The PLSA and the SPP were united in their views on proposed service levels for the dashboards. The consultation admitted that a standard requiring responses from providers to individuals seeking to see information about each of their pensions within two seconds “may, however, create a barrier to calculating real time values for some providers”.

The PLSA’s members have said that this benchmark on “view requests” is “too tight and is likely to discourage them from doing real-time calculations”.

Read More: @Pension Expert