On the go: The Pensions Dashboards Programme has completed the connection of the first commercial dashboard provider, alongside another integrated service provider.
Data, intelligence and payments company Moneyhub, which was selected by the PDP in December to take part in its six-month “alpha” phase, along with two other potential providers, announced on June 23 that its commercial dashboard was the first to be fully connected to the central architecture.
It is expected that the Financial Conduct Authority will create an authorisation process for commercial providers, known as qualifying pensions dashboards services, and Moneyhub stressed the importance of collaboration within the industry.
It previously released a “sandbox dashboard” into the public domain in a bid to share knowledge and spur innovation.
The next phase for the company, now that its commercial dashboard is connected to the central architecture, will involved detailed beta testing using real pensions data during the second half of this year.
Moneyhub chief commercial officer Dan Scholey said: “We are delighted to have connected our dashboard in the planned six-month alpha timeline. There is now considerable appetite among pension providers, banks and other organisations to offer their customers a single view of their finances in order to make more informed decisions and deliver better outcomes.
“We are proud to be building on our pioneering open finance heritage, bringing solutions to our clients’ customers, giving them control over their financial information, and enhancing their financial wellbeing.”
In another dashboards development, Heywood Pension Technology announced that its integrated service provider solution had successfully connected to the PDP architecture, and testing had begun on end-to-end transactions.
Heywood joined financial services software company Altus and platform technology specialist ITM, which together launched an ISP solution that moved to the second development stage in April.
Heywood became involved in building a dashboard prototype in 2016, and was confirmed as an alpha programme participant in April 2021. It has since been involved in designing the dashboards’ application programming interface — a set of programming code that allows two applications to talk to each other.
It billed its ISP as suitable for all clients, irrespective of their underlying administration platforms.
Heywood’s head of propositions Chris Connelly said: “The success of the PDP ecosystem depends on ISP providers delivering compliant, secure and scalable solutions.
“Most administration platforms aren’t set up to cope with the demands dashboards will place on them. A good ISP will deliver compliance in a cost-effective way and protect production systems from large, unpredictable traffic flows, whether that traffic is the initial IT load from the pension finder service, or the subsequent flow of follow-up activity from members.”
