NETHERLANDS- Dutch pension fund participants will be able to find details of a member's combined pension rights on one website within two years.

One push of a button and it will be possible to view the total pensions claims an employee has built up during his or her entire working life, the newly-founded Stichting Pensionregister has claimed.

According to the organisation, the information will be easily accessible even workers have had 20 different employers, are participant in 10 different pension schemes or have even lost the documents involved.

The Stichting Pensioenregister is a co-operation between the pension fund organisations VB, OPF and UvB, along with the insurers' lobbying organisation VvV and the Sociale Verzekeringsbank, will co-ordinate the creation of the central administration organisation chaired by Francine Giskes.

The pension register will include the future benefits of the state pension AOW, and will also show where pension rights originate as well as where participants can obtain additional information, the stakeholders said in a joint statement.

The central pension register will be set up in two stages so it will initially contain information about the entitlements from the AOW and the collective pension schemes, while the second stage launch will include information concerning rights to third-pillar schemes.

The pension register is expected to be operational by January 1 2011.

The Netherlands is following in the footsteps of other European nations as Denmark launched its own central administration for combined pension rights last year, known as PensionsInfo, to which all 250 pension providers participate.

The key difference, however, is the Danish admin system has been set up as a portal, which automatically retrieves information from the providers, rather than requiring the organisation to managed the data itself.

Moreover, a comparison between the two systems is difficult because there are many more pension providers in the Netherlands, according to Gerda Smits, spokeswoman for VB.

VB, OPF and UvB represent approximately 450 pension funds with 5.7 million active participants, 1.8 million pensioners and 7.3 million deferred participants.

As social security provider, the Sociale Verzekeringsbank pays AOW to 2.6 million clients.

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