Committee room 1 of the House of Lords and today’s discussion around pension interface standards, data quality and future pensions law considerations.
Can both the pensions and payroll industry benefit from the use of APIs and a common standard? Would that ever be achieved without a legal compliance framework?
The consistency of data requirements across the pension industry is a vast array of differences, all in an attempt to do very similar things.
Confusion over backwards terminology is still rife with terms such as Net Pay arrangement or Net Pay scheme which has nothing to do with Net and more to do with Gross. And Relief At Source which has little to do with relief at all and more close to Net. No wonder such a sizeable minority of schemes get it wrong.
Into the future there is an aim for a payroll dashboard where an individual can see all of their pension history and entitlements, however, this is dependent on common formats, accuracy of data and an ability to tie up various separated employment related pension histories.
Will legacy pension applications modernise to enable better inter connectivity, the potentials for ‘ Open Pensions’ in similar vain as Open Banking.
Under the chair of Baroness Altmann (former pension minister) along with representatives from both payroll and pensions, is there an appetite to grab the bull by the horns and promote a more unified approach to what is, after all, a common requirement across employers and work place pensions?
