You already know that there will be multiple pensions dashboards, and why it’s so important to offer your own.
The next step to decide is whether you have the time, tech, resource and expertise to build your pensions dashboard in-house, or if you should partner with a Technical Services Provider like Moneyhub who can do the legwork for you.
Building your dashboard in-house: The cons
Higher upfront costs – including training, recruitment, necessary licenses, hardware and many other overheads that will need to be sustained.
Slower to get started – finding the right people to build your team is incredibly time-consuming. This process will likely take several weeks, and you have to factor in any notice potential employees have to give to their current organisations.
The regulatory factors - these are incredibly complex. You’ll need to consider:
Permissions: Your compliance teams will need to make a very detailed Variation of Permission (VoP) application to the FCA to be a regulated Pensions Dashboard Service (PDS) firm, with evidence demonstrating, for example, how you have considered the Consumer Duty customer understanding outcome.
Compliant User Interface (UI): The “front-end” pensions dashboard display that you build must be capable of showing pensions from right across the UK pensions universe, compliant with the FCA PDCOB Handbook rules, the Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) Data and Design Standards as well as DWP’s State Pension display standards.
Compliant technical integration with ecosystem: Your technologists will need to develop and test detailed technology connections with a) the PDP Central Digital Architecture (CDA) (for the Find process) and b) data providers (for the View process), compliant with the PDP Technical and Security Standards.
Ongoing operations, reporting and audit: Once you launch your pensions dashboard, it will need to be continually compliant with the PDP Operational and Service Standards, with ongoing management information reports being produced, compliant with the PDP Reporting Standards and the FCA supervisory requirements, as well as enabling annual audits by an independent external expert party to assess your ongoing compliance with all the various Standards
Building your dashboard in-house: The pros
Dedication – You’ll have a small team dedicated solely to your project full-time with no competing priorities.
In-depth knowledge of your business and your customers – Employees will have insight into your business and customer needs, mindset, branding, and vision, informing the way they develop your product.
Faster sign-offs/approvals – unlike working with a third party, less organisation needs to go into setting up discussions for sign-offs and approvals. These things happen much quicker when you can have an informal chat over lunch or in the meeting room.
Flexibility – there isn’t a fixed budget or other constraints that come with working with an external partner, so you can spend more time tweaking and modifying your product.
Partnering to build your Pensions Dashboard: The cons
More coordination required - occasionally, when there’s multiple parties at the table, sign offs or revisions can become more complex.
Upfront cost - paying a chunk of the project costs up front can initially make partnering look like a more expensive option.
Partnering to build your Pensions Dashboard: The pros
Extensive expertise & talent under one roof - we bring a unique combination of all the necessary multi-disciplinary expertise required for this complex project including:
Regulatory compliance
Pensions knowledge (DB & DC)
User experience
User interface design
API development
Maintenance
Service and support
De-risk your project - with our Open Finance connectivity you’d be able to show your customers all of their financial assets alongside their pensions, discouraging them to move between apps.
Plug & Play - rather than using valuable time finding, building. the right team to work on your dashboard, we have an expertly informed team of people ready to get working with you right away.
We do the testing, so you don’t have to - we’re uniquely advantaged by our consumer money management app as a means for testing, responding and tweaking based on how real users interact with the tech. The results of these tests are then rolled out across our clients’ apps, meaning you’ll have the best, most intuitive product on the market right from the start.
An Alpha partner of the Pensions Dashboards Programme - the PDP selected us as one of their alpha partners and we were the first commercial dashboard to successfully connect to the central architecture.
First line support - your users will have access to our front-line technical support team
Cost effective - the time and resource savings available by partnering with a Technical Services Provider reduce your overall project costs.
Holistic financial picture - with our Open Banking and Open Finance connectivity you’ll be able to build the most engaging onward journeys for your customers - show your customers all of their financial assets alongside their pensions, discouraging them to move between apps, or power modellers, calculators and consolidation services.
How would it work?
Embedding Moneyhub’s dashboard within your existing app or website.
For optimal customer journeys, both into and back out of your dashboard, you will very likely wish to embed our fully compliant pensions dashboard within your existing app(s) or website(s) which your customers already use and are already familiar with.
There are options for how to achieve this embedding, depending on whether your firm wishes to:
Be the regulated pensions dashboard service (PDS) firm or
Rely on Moneyhub’s PDS permissions.
There are pros and cons to these different options, which we’ll come back to in our next update.
For now, all you need to think about is whether you want to do a dashboard, whether building in-house or partnering with a TSP is right for your business.