A new report has laid the groundwork for developing an EU-wide pension tracking service to give people an easy way of tracing all their pensions savings and entitlements.
The Brussels-based Groupe Consultatif Actuariel Européen (European Actuarial Consultative Group) has published a report on existing national pension tracking services, which gives advice on moving towards a scaled-up EU version of these services.
The existing services in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands are widely used, according to the report, receiving more than 10m visits last year, which equates to around 10% of the total population of the four countries.
The Groupe Consultatif said it produced the report in response to the growing interest in developing EU pension tracking services.
It also cited the European Commission’s White Paper on Pensions (2012), which said tracking services could give citizens accurate and up-to-date information about pension entitlements, as well as projections of income after retirement from statutory and occupational pension schemes.
According to the report, there are two ways of setting up tracking services.
One is to set up a database, or use an existing one, for consumers to log in to, while the other is to use a so-called ‘service bus’, which makes personal data instantly available to the consumer when logging in to the system.
The Groupe Consultatif said, for national tracking services to succeed, it was necessary to have enough data sources, and for these to cover as many consumers in that country as possible.
The services in the four countries in the report covered on average 90-100% of consumers’ pension benefits, the group said.
A central secure log-in system makes it easy for people to “log in with confidence”.
“The most efficient way to develop an EU tracking service will be to use the experience of the existing national tracking services, and build on this to create a portal that combines knowledge from the different countries,” it said.
Such a portal should start with the facility to show a consumer’s current pension benefits, and this could be extended later to more countries, with a range of capabilities being introduced to model expected future pension entitlement, it said.
The Groupe Consultatif said its Taskforce on Tracking Services would now look further into possible setups of national tracking services in other EU countries.
The results of these investigations will be published in 2014, it said.
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