Dunstan Thomas launches ISP offering for Pensions Dashboards Imago Connect
14 Oct 2022
After extensive consultation with existing customers, prospects and the Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) team, the leading fintech provider Dunstan Thomas launches its Integrated Service Provider (ISP) offering for Pensions Dashboards, Imago Connect.
Imago Connect has been designed and built to enable all types of pension providers to meet their pension dashboard obligations in a straight forward and cost effective manner, whilst remaining fully compliant. Imago Connect will enter PDP conformance testing from early next month. Testing will confirm it enables providers to deliver the right data, rapidly, reliably and in a highly scalable and secure way in conformance with GDPR as well as PDP data standards, technology and service delivery requirements.
Imago Connect has been designed to ensure a very rapid and accurate match response based on the data match rules of providers. The objective is to enable providers to unite users with their pensions once their identity has been verified on a dashboard.
Imago Connect
Paul Muir, Products Director, Dunstan Thomas said:
“ISPs have one core job – to unite policyholders with pension policies they may have forgotten they had. We’ve built Imago Connect to enable providers to meet the needs of dashboards in a straight forward manner whilst ensuring we can accurately support customers to view data about existing policies within the tight targets set by the PDP.
“We have been working with a number of providers for several months now to make sure their policy data is ready to extract and display on Pensions Dashboards. Providers will need to be ready to handle ‘finds’ at an industrial scale – they will need to handle thousands and possibly millions of data requests per day once they have been onboarded. Our ISP service will offer the resilience, robustness and scalability to ensure tough PDP SLAs are met.”
Key Data in Pensions Dashboards Data Standards
- Find data – data about a potential policyholder will be sent to the provider to see if you have any data on that person
- Pension Arrangement Data – data about the actual provider for that policy
- Administrator Data – data about who to contact concerning pension benefits
- Employment Data – where the pension has been provided by an employer (i.e., an Auto-Enrolment scheme)
- Estimated Retirement Data – Benefits of a scheme at a policyholder’s estimated retirement date
- Accrued Benefit Data – Values relating to the policyholder’s benefits to date
- Signpost Data – Further information such as costs and charges and annual statements.
The most significant risk to providers is failing to deliver accurate data within tight timescales. The Pensions Regulator’s own guidance (as regards PDP compliance) says:
“You need to be confident in the accuracy of the data you are using for matching (dashboard users with their pension policy data). If your data is not reliable, you risk returning data for the wrong person or not finding a pension record when you should. This may lead to an enforcement action being taken against you by the Information Commissioner’s Office or by us.”
Andrew Martin, Chief Distribution Officer, Dunstan Thomas added:
“There are some critical hygiene factors to consider here. If you cannot deliver data matches in 300 milliseconds and make correct data viewable by the dashboard user within 15 seconds, then you will not be compliant with Pensions Dashboard requirements and you are heading for some massive fines.
“All the providers which we have been working with for the last few months are ready. Imago Connect now needs to pass rigorous conformance testing over the next two months to ensure reliability, resilience, and robustness in the delivery of accurate data and data matches. We’ve set out to deliver not only a highly reliable service, but one that is highly cost effective for all providers.
“So, rather than building too many bells and whistles into Imago Connect, we have focused on delivering the right solution, at the right price - ready to meet providers pending regulatorily requirements. We want to encourage them to shop around for the best of breed ISP offering, rather than defaulting to their incumbent software provider. We believe Dunstan Thomas is well placed to help all participating providers.”
Dunstan Thomas will be hosting a live webinar entitled ‘Will Pensions Dashboards be the initiative which finally moves the needle of pensions engagement?’ on Thursday 27th October, to discuss the progress, sticking points and hopes for the Pensions Dashboard Programme (PDP) in discussion with senior representatives from both MaPS and the DWP who have helped shape new regulation, as well as the data and technical standards which will underpin Pensions Dashboards.
Pensions Dashboard Webinar
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