Pensions - Articles - Comment on House of Lords amendments to Pension Bill

 The House of Lords agreed the following amendments:

 • To prevent financial transactions taking place on dashboards to prevent scams, and
 • Blocking commercial dashboards until the MaPS dashboard has been operating for a year.

 The purpose of pension dashboards is to let savers see all their pensions online in one place. This will be a valuable way of savers keeping track of their pensions. But once they have found their pensions, savers may wish to start consolidating these into modern schemes which tend to have not only lower charges, but also better engagement tools to help them plan for retirement.

 “Pension scams are on the rise, and this is a risk well-recognised within the pensions industry, which is why we’ve called for regulations to protect savers using pension dashboards. All dashboards must be regulated and meet high standards to protect members from scammers. This should include having the ability to stop transfers when suspicious activity is triggered by warning systems.

 “We want pension dashboards to be successful in terms of encouraging members to sign up and use them so they can find out how much they’ve saved in a pension and what more they need to do.

 “Pension savers are more likely to use a pension dashboard with their current pension provider, as they have an existing relationship with them and an established level of trust. The dashboard can also be incorporated into the overall customer experience to form a core part of a customer’s savings journey. This can be complemented by online planning and support tools from their provider which is likely to help with improving pension engagement levels. The sooner pension dashboards are up and running, the better.”