IT challenges and opportunities, financial literacy improvements and links with the European pension tracking service were among discussion points at an event focused on the future evolution of the German pension dashboard in Berlin this week.
Setting the scene, Imke Petersen, head of the Zentrale Stelle für die Digitale Renteübersicht (ZfDR), the unit created within the first pillar manager responsible for designing the platform, said Deutsche Rentenversicherung, which was commissioned to design and operate the dashboard, planned to this year publish an evaluation report, “and on this basis further develop the portal, step by step”.
Germany’s dashboard – Digitale Rentenübersicht – went live on 30 June last year.
Dina Frommert, head of the research and development department at the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, said it was an achievement building a portal that had been in the making for almost 20 years, and that its further development was part of the evaluation process.
Klaus Stiefermann, managing director of the occupation pension association Aba, represented the second pillar in the steering committee responsible for developing the portal. He spoke about the limits of the dashboard in boosting pension adequacy.
“All the information is there (on the dashboard) but people can’t get started with it,” he said. “Financial literacy plays a great role and this site cannot provide it, it can support it.”
Stiefermann also pointed at the IT challenges that occupational pension schemes had to face to connect to the dashboard, and easier access to the dashboard.
“There are many more steps to further develop the platform, we are at the beginning”
Moritz Schumann, head of the retirement unit at German Insurance Association GDV
One of the challenges ahead is onboarding pension schemes on the dashboard by the end of this year, according to the law drafted by the government.
So far 288 pension funds are connected to the dashboard and around 1.76m people have visited the portal, which has 156,000 registered users.
Deutsche Rentenversichung plans to connect 1,500 pension schemes by the end of the year, and have a “seven digit number” of users, Petersen said.
Financial education strategy
State secretary Florian Toncar said that the government planned this year to finalise a financial education strategy, in partnership with the OECD, to help guide investors in their decision-making processes.
“What would help is the portal giving an aggregated value (of pension entitlements),” added Moritz Schumann, head of the retirement unit at the German Insurance Association GDV. “There are many more steps (to further develop the platform), we are at the beginning”.
For André Geilenkothen, partner and head of pension funding consulting at Mercer and representing one of the five advisory boards set up to develop the platform, further steps for the dashboard could include improving the overall concept of the platform to compare different types of entitlements and starting to think about integrating the dashboard into the European pension tracking service.
State secretary Toncar noted that although the EU financial data access regulation is not directly linked to the pension products in Germany, it opens up the possibility to develop business models in the field of open finance that can link up to the pension dashboard, improving offerings for investors.
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