Pensions dashboards: Sixty million records, one missing number

But the question that should have been asked at the start remains unanswered: how will the industry know whether any of this worked?

The scheme-side milestones are clear, at least: connection rates, data quality scores, regulatory compliance.

The member-side outcomes are where the issue lies – they have no agreed definition.

The dashboard does not change anything simply by existing, without defined milestones the temptation will be to count logins, declare delivery, and move on. 10.7 million UK adults are too busy or too confused to think about their pension, and half of adults have no plan for their finances in retirement – not because they are careless, but because a system that never felt relevant to them has given them no reason to start.[1] The dashboard is a response to that landscape, but is not evidence that the landscape has changed (yet).

The international precedent suggests that visibility alone won't move the dial without an equal effort to improve the experience users have when they do interact with their pension.

A 2018 New Zealand Financial Markets Authority trial that redesigned the letters KiwiSaver members received at age 56 raised voluntary contributions from six respondents to three hundred and thirty.[2]

The lesson from New Zealand is that the same information, delivered in a more easily digestible manner, can be the difference between 55x more (or less) people actually engaging with their pensions – ie. design matters more than volume.[3]

Nest Insight has consistently found that engagement and educational interventions have, for the most part, been ineffective at encouraging people to contribute more – which is why the policy debate has shifted to statutory minimums.

The lesson is uncomfortable for an industry that has spent the last decade vaguely calling for "more engagement": behavioural change is only possible when it is designed for, measured against, and consistently improved upon. Counting logins is a vanity metric.

What the industry needs now is a structure for how to make these metrics tangible.

One answer could be a panel published each quarter – The Pensions Regulator (TPR), the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) and the Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) reviewing four member-side outcomes: the contribution rate change for members within a defined period of first dashboard login; the small pot consolidation rate; the take-up of targeted support among dashboard users; and a comprehension test, namely whether a member, having seen their dashboard, can accurately describe what they own and what it will pay. Each metric must be disaggregated by age band – a system that improves outcomes for fifty-five-year-olds but not twenty-five-year-olds has not closed the gap it set out to close.

Without something along these lines, the industry will have built the largest piece of pensions infrastructure in a generation while letting providers define success by what they delivered rather than what changed for the people it was built for.

The dashboard's arrival is the moment the industry will either learn to measure itself by member outcomes or admit it does not want to. The first answer is the one that earns trust. The second is the one that hardens distrust. There is no third option.

Archie Pritchett is a senior operations associate at PensionPay.