Pensions dashboards have “lots of flaws, and lots of gaps”, and their “one-size-fits-all” approach will not help improve awareness amongst those that struggle to engage with their pensions, Isio head of benefit design and change, Scott Kendrick, has warned.

Speaking at the PLSA Annual Conference, Kendrick stated that “engagement in pensions is low”.

He highlighted research from the Pensions Policy Institute (PPI), which showed that 30 per cent of people do not know how much they have saved, while 80 per cent have never thought about how much they ought to save and 80 per cent have also never looked at their investments.

“The question for me is around awareness of who would benefit from engagement and what do we do with those that will just never engage,” Kendrick said.

“The pensions dashboards will certainly help but they feel like one-size-fits-all, and there are lots of flaws and there are lots of gaps. The one size-fits-all approach is not going to work. If you don’t understand something, you’re not going to engage with it,” he explained.

“Yes, dashboards have the potential to improve awareness and engagement, but think we’ll be waiting for dashboards 2.0 or 3.0 before we get to [engagement] nirvana,” Kendrick added.

Speaking exclusively to Pensions Age, Kendrick explained that “dashboards are a really important first step”.

“However, everyone has a different set of circumstances… dashboards are going to miss lots of people around the edges," he continued.

"We might be happy with that as we are still improving things, but I just don’t think we can claim with dashboards that we have done it now. With regards to engagement, it needs to be constant.

"Dashboards are a way to do it but it is just a one-size-fits-all that will get a chunk of people in the middle. We need multi-channel support to complement the dashboards, to help those people who are going to miss out.”

Kendrick also warned that while auto-enrolment has been "fantastic", there is a "crisis looming" with regards to retirement saving generally.

“There are 12.5 million people still undersaving for retirement – the population of London, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham all not saving enough for their retirement," Kendrick continued.

"Two in five people retiring between 2030-2040 are undersaving. Many of those people that are auto-enrolled will probably think ‘job done’ because they look towards the experts and think they have done the right thing. They will most likely feel aggrieved when they are facing poverty in retirement."

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