PASA says collaborative working and a new focus on how service providers support schemes to become ‘Connection Ready’, will help maintain dashboards momentum
Key headlines
Maintaining momentum: In light of the new ‘final connection deadline’ announced today by the Minister, it’s essential schemes continue to prepare in line with their service providers’ phased plans which cover the activities required for a scheme to be ready to connect to pensions dashboards. To support this PASA will be pursuing even closer collaborative working with DWP, MaPS and regulators as well as trustees and all other parties involved in the dashboards programme. This will help maintain momentum so savers can use dashboards sooner.
The current legislated connection timetable formed the basis of industry capacity planning for the major programme of work needed to prepare schemes for dashboards. Whilst there is no immediate replacement for the timetable, PASA will use its members’ experience to date to help define what it takes for schemes to become ‘Connection Ready’, how long it takes for the average scheme. We’ll also set out what this looks like in terms of a master project plan which will help both service providers carrying this out for a range of schemes and in-house schemes, as well as needing to achieve wider operational readiness to support savers once dashboards are launched.
In addition to this we will continue to build on the suite of good practice guidance to schemes and service providers issued so far.
PASA’s approach will focus on:
- Supporting Further Collaboration: PASA will continue to drive collaboration amongst all parties to help ensure dashboard connections are in place to ensure the essential end-to-end user testing of the ecosystem can start as soon as possible.
- Defining ‘Connection Ready’: PASA will create a new detailed definition of what being ‘ready to connect’ to dashboards means, covering the 95% of preparation needed to be achieved by schemes before actual connection, and work with DWP, MaPS and regulators to agree how this can best feed into the way schemes monitor and record their progress to being ready to connect to pensions dashboards.
- Supporting Scheme Planning: PASA will create guidance on planning your scheme preparation work based on the insight of our members. This will cover the practical aspects of planning and scheduling work, as well as the interdependencies between different tasks, and we’ll also produce a template ‘master plan’ for a typical service provider (administrator or software provider) that is preparing one or more schemes to be ‘connection ready’ over the next three years.
- Providing Good Practice Guidance: PASA will build on existing Guidance in key areas, such as data matching and preparation of value data. This will ensure schemes have insight from industry experts to help them successfully deliver.
Kim Gubler, PASA Chair, commented: “Schemes need to understand what they have to do to be ‘Connection Ready’ and PASA will be providing Guidance to support them with this. It will be based on our members’ collective experience because they’re tasked with executing most of these activities on behalf of schemes. We will also look to share our members’ insight into delivery of this work based on the project planning completed for schemes to comply with their responsibilities against the previous legislative timetable.”
“Our aim in doing this is to support industry in delivering the huge amount of preparation work required and is an example of the collaborative working PASA believes is critical to the ongoing success of the dashboards programme. We fully intend to continue to support all stakeholders over the next phase.”
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