Pensions Dashboards Update – August 2025

Schemes continue to connect in accordance with the staged timetable. It was announced last month that the state pension has connected with the ecosystem and that over 20 million records are now connected.

On 9 July the Pensions Administration Standards Association (PASA) published an updated version of its Data Matching Convention Guidance which incorporates industry experience and regulatory developments since the original edition was published in 2021.  The guidance aims to support schemes, administrators and providers and now provides a detailed roadmap for setting robust matching criteria. It states that the updates “are very much an evolution of the previous Guidance, so schemes and providers can use this to refine what they’ve done to date.” The updates focus on three principles: Emphasis on unique identifiers; Certainty of making a ‘Match Made’; and the need to target ‘Possible Match’ responses.

Last month the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) hosted a town hall event where regulators and industry gave updates from their respective areas.  The slides and Q&A from the event, including the MoneyHelper Pensions Dashboard demo are available here.

MaPS has set out its approach to consumer testing of the MoneyHelper Pensions Dashboard, noting that insights from testing will inform the timing of DWP’s decision to make the dashboard available to the public. The DWP is committed to providing the industry with 6 months’ notice before the dashboard is made publicly available. 

The Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) published guidance for trustees of occupational pension schemes that are eligible to voluntarily connect to the dashboards ecosystem pursuant to regulation 16 of the Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022.  The voluntary connection application process is in development and will be updated following industry feedback.

PDP has also published guidance detailing the process to follow where a scheme is connected to the dashboard but is changing its administrator and/or ISP.

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has launched an outreach exercise targeting the largest (100,000+ active and deferred memberships) occupational trust based schemes in scope for dashboards to understand the progress they are making with dashboard data preparations. TPR is intending to look at:

• The processes schemes have in place to keep up data quality on an ongoing basis 
• An assessment of the quality of the data schemes intend to use for matching 
• How schemes intend to deal with possible matches  
• The readiness of schemes’ value data
• How McCloud value information will be displayed (for Public Service schemes) 
• The processes schemes have in place to ensure that benefits are correctly calculated 

TPR also intends to reach out to a representative sample of smaller schemes to better understand their approach to their dashboards duties and to gather insights and information on specific challenges they are facing relating to connection, data and operational readiness.

TPR also published a report summarising results from its readiness survey along with a  blog encouraging schemes not to miss their dashboards deadline over a data debt, recognising that there is still a lot of work to do to ensure that data is ready for dashboards (for example digitising data, ensuring that DB value data is available and discussing preparations with AVC providers).

If you would like any advice or assistance with dashboards compliance, we are very well placed to help. Please contact Andy Prater, Susannah Young or your usual Burges Salmon Pensions and Lifetime Savings team contact.