PASA launches dashboards data matching guide
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The Pensions Administration Standards Association has published initial guidance on the choice of data matching convention that schemes must make ahead of their compliance with pensions dashboards legislation.
The new guidance aims to bring together industry practice and support schemes’ decision-making process. It hopes that applying industry practice will also result in cost efficiencies.
It is intended to help schemes with making decisions on how to digitally compare and match ‘find requests’ from users of dashboards against the records they hold, not just instruct schemes on how they should match. Trustees’ choice of matching will depend on the accuracy of the personal data they hold about their scheme members, across all of their deferred and active member records.
“As the pensions industry’s administration standards body, it makes sense for PASA to lead on helping schemes decide how they wish to match their records to the users of pensions dashboards,” said PASA chair, Kim Gubler.
The PASA DMC guidance has industry-wide support from the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, the Association of British Insurers, and a dozen leading suppliers of pensions administration software.
The guidance also contains practical examples and highlights unusual categories of pension scheme members who may require special consideration in terms of how their data is matched.
“This initial guidance is essential reading for all scheme trustees, pension providers and their suppliers. It is easy to sit back and wait for everything to be decided, but in truth, the scale of the job at hand means we must make an early start,” said EQ solutions director and chair of the PASA pensions dashboards working group, Chris Connelly.
The Department for Work and Pensions will shortly consult on draft dashboards regulations, and the Pensions Dashboards Programme is commencing its alpha build and test phase. Both will lead to further learnings, and supplemental PASA guidance will follow in 2022.
“Whilst it is true we do not yet know everything, we do know plenty to get started,” said Connelly.
Do schemes have the support they need collect this data in time for the pensions dashboard?
