Up close and personal - FCA proposes new rules to connect personal pensions to dashboards

There is an episode of I'm Alan Partridge where Steve Coogan's eponymous anti-hero calls his estranged wife to offer an unsolicited critique of her new partner's choice of hatchback, straight from the review pages of Top Gear magazine: uphill runs are described as "power-sappingly [sic] mundane", while overtaking coaches is a "long, drawn-out affair".

If the progress of the UK's pension dashboard journey has sometimes felt describable in similar terms, the start of 2022 has seen a discernible gear shift. On the heels of the DWP launching a consultation in January regarding its draft Pensions Dashboards Regulations (for occupational schemes), the FCA has now set out its proposed rules for FCA-regulated providers to connect and supply personal and stakeholder pension data to dashboards. 

Pension dashboards - simply, digital interfaces that give people information about all of their pension benefits (from state provision to employer-based and personal pension savings) in one place - have long been touted as a way to improve engagement and better decision-making among savers in a post-automatic enrolment and pension freedoms world. The FCA's support for pension dashboards can be traced back to its 2015 Retirement Income Market Study.

Under the FCA's proposed rules, providers will need to:

• connect personal and stakeholder pension schemes (including SIPPs) to MaPS' digital architecture, in line with MaPS' connection, security and technical standards (providers may do this by connecting existing administration systems direct to the ecosystem, or use an integrated solution to transfer information between host systems and the ecosystem); 
• be able to receive requests to find pension policies, and search records for data matches;
• be able to return view data to pension dashboards. 

The FCA has proposed an implementation deadline of 30 June 2023, in line with large master trusts (covered by the government's consultation). Transitional provisions have also been suggested to give a narrow tranche of smaller providers a later deadline of 31 October 2024 (in view of such providers' likely reliance on third-party integrated solution providers).

The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) was originally tasked by the government to create and run a dashboard. It has convened the Pensions Dashboards Programme to implement the necessary infrastructure to facilitate pensions dashboards, and is responsible for developing the required standards, specifications and technical requirements for the dashboards ecosystem. It is expected to consult on the standards referred to above later this year, with a view to being published once the government's regulations are approved by parliament.

The FCA is seeking responses to its proposals by 8 April (the DWP's parallel consultation will run to 13 March).