‘It breaks my heart’: Experts lose hope for dashboards over uncertain timeline
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Two people closely involved with pensions dashboards have suggested they do not think savers will ever see private sector dashboards, as government project delays risk making them commercially unviable.
Giving evidence to MPs on Wednesday, independent consultant Richard Smith, who chairs the Pensions Dashboards Operators Coalition, said: “It breaks my heart to share my view that I don’t think – even though your constituents desperately need them and want them – that we’re going to see any FCA-regulated dashboards.”
A long-time advocate of dashboards who has travelled to five countries to learn from international experience, Smith made the remarks during a Work and Pensions Committee non-inquiry session after the head of personal finance at digital-first savings provider Moneybox said even an optimistic timeline for making dashboards available to consumers would probably not be viable.
Brian Byrnes said Moneybox is currently unable to start building a dashboard because of the level of uncertainty around data and design standards.
“Last year I had our development teams and our product managers coming to me saying, ‘Can we get started on anything from a commercial pensions dashboard’. I just had to keep saying, ‘No, we don’t have the certainty, we don’t have the timelines’. They’ve stopped asking me now,” he revealed.
Byrnes said a timeline is expected to become available on the back of work being carried out by government agencies with the help of consultancy KPMG, but he added this might not offer the necessary reprieve.
“My concern for that is we don’t have a launch date for the Moneyhelper dashboard, so I’m sceptical whether we are then going to get a subsequent launch date for private sector dashboards,” he said.
The previous government pushed back a deadline for schemes to connect to the central digital architecture for dashboards to October 2026. Last year, the new government decided that the publicly run ‘Moneyhelper’ dashboard will be available to the public before its private sector counterparts but has not yet proposed a go-live date.
An optimistic expectation would be a timeline of 2029 or 2030, Byrnes said, but even this would be too late.
“If we get that, I would be pulled off this project, Moneybox would turn to me and say, ‘We can’t dedicate time to this over the next two or three years,” he said. “People just wouldn’t be able to dedicate the resource.”
Interested providers leaving would deprive regulators and government of the opportunity to collaborate, he warned, after Smith highlighted to MPs that international experts advised collaboration was key.
Giving evidence to MPs on Wednesday, independent consultant Richard Smith, who chairs the Pensions Dashboards Operators Coalition, said: “It breaks my heart to share my view that I don’t think – even though your constituents desperately need them and want them – that we’re going to see any FCA-regulated dashboards.”
A long-time advocate of dashboards who has travelled to five countries to learn from international experience, Smith made the remarks during a Work and Pensions Committee non-inquiry session after the head of personal finance at digital-first savings provider Moneybox said even an optimistic timeline for making dashboards available to consumers would probably not be viable.
Brian Byrnes said Moneybox is currently unable to start building a dashboard because of the level of uncertainty around data and design standards.
“Last year I had our development teams and our product managers coming to me saying, ‘Can we get started on anything from a commercial pensions dashboard’. I just had to keep saying, ‘No, we don’t have the certainty, we don’t have the timelines’. They’ve stopped asking me now,” he revealed.
Byrnes said a timeline is expected to become available on the back of work being carried out by government agencies with the help of consultancy KPMG, but he added this might not offer the necessary reprieve.
“My concern for that is we don’t have a launch date for the Moneyhelper dashboard, so I’m sceptical whether we are then going to get a subsequent launch date for private sector dashboards,” he said.
The previous government pushed back a deadline for schemes to connect to the central digital architecture for dashboards to October 2026. Last year, the new government decided that the publicly run ‘Moneyhelper’ dashboard will be available to the public before its private sector counterparts but has not yet proposed a go-live date.
An optimistic expectation would be a timeline of 2029 or 2030, Byrnes said, but even this would be too late.
“If we get that, I would be pulled off this project, Moneybox would turn to me and say, ‘We can’t dedicate time to this over the next two or three years,” he said. “People just wouldn’t be able to dedicate the resource.”
Interested providers leaving would deprive regulators and government of the opportunity to collaborate, he warned, after Smith highlighted to MPs that international experts advised collaboration was key.
Will restrictive rules hamper usefulness?
Byrnes also said the rules for private sector dashboards are "incredibly restrictive and onerous”, suggesting they would hamper the user experience. Users of a financial app or website, would need a dashboards login that is separate from their app or website login. In the dashboards environment, they will only be able to view their pensions, as actions are limited to modelling retirement income.
"[There will be] absolutely no transactions whatsoever. No consolidation, for example. You can't top up pensions,” he said. “I can understand how we have got to that point but would like to make the committee aware that it is not the case that you would log into Moneybox, Lloyds [or another provider] and suddenly see all of your pensions there, it is still going to live in a very separate, restricted world.”
