On the go: Altus and ITM have joined forces to launch the first commercial pensions dashboards integrated service provider, which will provide technology to connect savers to their pensions.
The partnership between the financial services software company and the pensions data and platform technology business will provide an open-market connection to pensions dashboards, as established by regulations.
While Capgemini, in partnership with fintech Origo, will deliver the pension finder service, consent and authorisation services, and governance register, there is a need for a system that will allow schemes to provide the data for the dashboards, Maurice Titley, chief innovation officer at ITM, told Pensions Expert.
He explained that when an individual makes a request to find their pensions to the dashboards, these are sent “to as many places as they need to go to answer that question to find every single pension that the individual might have”.
“The problem is that there are probably 40,000 different pension arrangements, so pinging 40,000 different points is something that is probably never going to work within the architecture,” Titley said.
“It’s long been assumed that the way this will work is that various pension arrangements would effectively be clubbing together, and using a concept called an integrated service provider to act as their point where the data is effectively connected into the pensions dashboards.”
Altus and ITM — one of the volunteer organisations that have signed up to be part of the testing phases of the project — will offer this dashboard connection to their existing clients, as well as other pension schemes, administrators and data providers across the market.
The goal is to align “best-in-class existing and trusted capabilities into a single integrated service provider solution”, according to a statement.
Titley added: “There’s going to be huge spikes in terms of individuals using dashboards, and all these pension find requests coming in need to be handled in a certain and timely way.
“The individuals need to get the responses that they would expect, and then they need to see the rest of the information that’s provided about those individual pension records. And that is happening pretty much real time, so the requirements on having a very resilient and responsive capability are pretty huge.”
Ben Cocks, director at Altus, noted: “The regulations to compel pension administrators to connect to the dashboards are coming down the tracks fast.”
He added: “We all know that running pension schemes in the real world is a complicated business, but by joining forces with ITM we can provide administrators with a straightforward route to compliance.
“The Altus/ITM dashboard connection solution can be the cornerstone of a successful rollout of the pensions dashboards.”
