Progress on pensions dashboards has been ramping up over the past year, with less than six months to go until the first mandatory window opens for pension providers and schemes to begin connecting to the ecosystem.

And this is expected to be a key project for administrators in the new year, according to Pensions Administration Standards Association (Pasa) director, Paul Sturgess.

“Preparation for pensions dashboards will inevitably be a key project for 2023 with the largest schemes and master trusts having all the really heavy lifting to do in 2023 notwithstanding that members of the public won’t be using them in action until later," he explained.

However, Sturgess clarified that preparation for dashboards won’t just be about connectivity explaining that "our old friend data will have an important role to play".

"Getting data ‘super squeaky clean’ will save administrators having to expend great volumes of effort and resource on partial matches but perhaps that is an investment for 2024 carried out in 2023," he explained.

Adding to this, Pasa chair, Kim Gubler, stated: “Like Paul says, dashboards is going to take up a considerable amount of time for the first adopters and there’s some nervousness around testing and the saver experience.

“By the end of next year there will have been a lot of lessons learned, which will benefit schemes staging in 2024.”

In addition to this, Gubler suggested that learnings from the dashboards user experience research could be used to support how administrators communicate with savers, arguing that this is “an opportunity worth taking”.

Dashboards data is not the only consideration for the year ahead, however, as Sturgess noted that “we will have another old friend GMP in its equalisation guise to consider, a tricky parallel double act with dashboards…as they say it doesn’t rains when it pours”.

“And to top it all the member engagement season will play out,” he continued.

“All of that is of course before we get to liability management exercises as scheme seek to capitalise on enhanced funding status which of course brings us back to data… Overall then not much happening in 2023 …who said pensions was boring…."”

Yet with so much work on the horizon, Gubler warns that the challenge of resourcing will be “ever present” in the new year, particularly with the number of projects likely to be running concurrently.

“The industry has failed to ‘grow its own’ on the scale now required and pension administrators are attracting skills people from their peers,” she continued. “We’re already seeing some evidence of skills shortages, and this is likely to increase next year.”

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