Mr Howorth therefore encourages advisers to “engage now in what the dashboard requirements are”.
Therefore, although the dashboard will be primarily for the end consumer, it could end up being a tool to help drive engagement and personal financial advice.
According to Mr Brown: “Clients can use it to show their advisers all of the client’s pension pots in one place.
“This will further enable advisers to offer high-quality advice that is personalised to each client.”
Moreover, Mr Greenwood believes the dashboard will be a “perfect motivator” in that discovering a ‘forgotten’ pension pot or two might prompt consumers to seek an expert for further guidance on their financial affairs.
Mr Howorth adds: “The opportunities do not stop there; there is the potential for advisers to also become dashboard providers, and develop services that would complement the face-to-face model.”
What advisers want
However, although the Association of British Insurers (ABI) firmly believes the development of dashboard services will augment the role of traditional financial advice, taking the advisers away from a paper-based process and onto dashboard-enabled applications, there are still things to be considered by those developing the dashboard.
Rob Yuille, head of retirement policy for the ABI, promises that these are already known to the ABI and the team developing the prototype, and will be worked on and delivered.
According to him, these issues include how accessible a client’s dashboard will be to advisers, and how data protection processes will be appropriate.
He says: “The prototype project has not yet considered how a third party such as an adviser could access dashboard data on a customer’s behalf. This will be possible and will be addressed soon.
“For this to work, clients and advisers will need to have a strong set of protections in place to ensure data is used appropriately.”
Ms Tait believes standardisation will help in this regard: “Advisers will naturally want to obtain more in-depth information than their clients would, but this is probably more appropriately achieved using specific requests for information.
“In the end, advisers’ jobs will be made easier if every dashboard provides a consistent set of standard information, regardless of the source.”
The ABI has urged advisers to make their voice heard, as the project “must continue to be one that involves the industry as a whole”, Mr Yuille adds.
Scheme sponsors and corporate advice
Some firms are creating forums and committees to help pension schemes and their corporate advisers plan for the launch of the dashboards.
