Behind every great innovation there tends to be a rather boring document setting out the minutiae of how the thing works.

Every page on the internet rests on top of thousands of pages of protocols, data exchanges and the steady hum of a server in a remote facility.

Pensions dashboards will be no different. What the consumer will see is a well-designed portal displaying their long-term savings; what will sit underneath is a vast network of messaging systems, security checks, and an unprecedented degree of cross industry cooperation.

When a consumer instructs their chosen dashboard to find all their pensions they will not see the thousands of messages pinging across to servers across the country, but they will be upset if it goes wrong.

That is why the Pensions Dashboards Programme’s data standards work is so important. For the system to work thousands of schemes across hundreds of administrators need to be speaking the same language.

Something as anodyne as imputing dates in a different format could cause serious problems.

Data standards will provide the rules of the road that will allow all of those thousands of messages and securely processed tokens to be turned into the experience we want
for consumers.

These publications aren’t the final version and there is more work to do before they can be implemented by providers, but it’s a very big step in the right direction.

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