Happy New Year! As principal of the Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP), this is an opportune moment to reflect on a momentous 2024, and to look ahead to 2025.

Last year was marked by significant milestones, from the release of the connection timetable in guidance, to embarking on the connection journey with the first of our volunteer participants and welcoming the new government’s support for the programme, all bringing pensions dashboards closer to reality.

As we move into 2025, I’m excited to build on this momentum and drive further advancements at scale.

This year will see major developments such as the start of wider industry connection to the dashboards ecosystem and user testing of the dashboards service, and I’m pleased to share these plans in more detail.

Connection to the dashboards ecosystem

One of our main priorities in 2024 was working with our volunteer participants, a cohort of pension providers and schemes, administrators and integrated service providers (ISPs) who are building a direct connection to the dashboards ecosystem.

We have been helping them get started with their connection journey and move through the process, making incremental refinements based on their feedback.

All our 20 volunteer participants have now begun the connection process. Three of these organisations have successfully completed integration testing, a significant step in which several tests are run in PDP’s test environment. These organisations are now progressing through the final stages of connection.

Over the first few months of 2025, our primary focus is continuing connection with all 20 volunteer participants, with as many as possible connected by the end of April. This is so connection with the pension providers and schemes who have duties under the legislation to connect can get underway at that point as currently planned.

We have been regularly collecting feedback from our volunteer participants and using these insights to refine the process for other organisations.

We have made improvements to guidance, supporting documents and backstage processes, and are looking to publish further information on connection and the handling of registration codes on our website shortly. In the meantime, pension providers and schemes are advised to liaise with their connecting organisations on this.

Dashboard development and user testing

In October 2024, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) issued a ministerial statement affirming its support for pensions dashboards. The government also confirmed that the MoneyHelper pensions dashboard will be made available to the public before commercial dashboards.

We will continue to work closely with our Money and Pensions Service (Maps) colleagues on development and testing of the MoneyHelper dashboard and the dashboards central digital architecture. This year, we will be integrating the find and identity services with the MoneyHelper dashboard.

We will also be undertaking work to shape end-to-end user testing with pension providers and schemes with the MoneyHelper dashboard. The testing itself will start with small numbers of real users at first and will ramp up over time.

This user testing will be invaluable, to provide insights not just for the MoneyHelper dashboard but for commercial dashboards further down the line.

The government remains committed to commercial dashboards, which are an important part of our 2025 plans. This year, we will begin preliminary work on identifying opportunities and challenges for commercial dashboards.

We will identify how this work will be structured in future with industry, including potential dashboard providers. This will include work on dashboard design standards.

Engaging with partners and industry

Collaboration with industry and partners is fundamental to the success of dashboards. Throughout 2024 we regularly engaged with the government, regulators and industry at various working groups and events.

We ended the year with an inaugural pensions dashboards ‘town hall’ event hosted by the Maps, bringing together partners and representatives from across industry.

In 2025, we will keep up this collaborative spirit by continuing to attend and share the latest updates at such events and regular forums. By working closely with the government and regulators, we can together make sure the latest updates get to industry as they become available.

We are exploring further opportunities for engaging with industry in 2025. We would like to build on the success of the town hall event by creating similar forums for networking in person and sharing the latest programme updates.

More on these plans will be shared as they develop. We will also continue holding regular PDP webinars in which we present updates on a particular topic and invite questions. Details will be available on our website and in our regular stakeholder emails.

A big thank you

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the many people across industry, government and regulators who have helped contribute to a successful 2024, and I look forward to continuing our work together in 2025.

Together, we are moving ever closer to achieving our common goal of making pensions dashboards available and helping improve financial wellbeing and stability.

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