Experts have cast doubt on whether the European Tracking Service on Pensions (ETS) will ever give EU citizens a full view on all the pensions they have accumulated throughout the bloc.
Specialists from three national pensions tracking services yesterday shared their years of experience setting up the consumer-facing platforms at a seminar hosted by the European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA) with the aim of helping other European Union member states develop tracking services.
The European Commission’s pension package presented last November contains a recommendation encouraging member states to set up or improve national pension tracking systems, including a future connection to the ETS, which is currently being rolled out.
Moderating the online event, Kimon Argyropoulos, senior regulatory policy advisor at EFAMA, ended by asking the speakers what they assessed the potential to be for the ETS, saying: “Do you think it’s the right time to Europeanise?”
Dan Adolphson Björck, pension expert at Swedish pensions tracking service minPension, said achieving the data quality and broad cooperation necessary for a tracking service to work had only been possible in his experience through a close and long-term cooperation.
“So this is not a development that can take place from one day to another, you have to accept the fact that it takes time,” he said. “And also I would like to emphasise that we cannot force people into this. That is the wrong approach.”
Michael Rasch, executive director of PensionsInfo in Denmark, said the discussion had just shown three pension systems that were very different. “Imagine showing all that information combined – it is extremely complex,” he said.
“Instead of trying to develop a full European tracking service solution, I would rather say if you have been working in Sweden, Denmark or Belgium, log onto their national sites,” Rasch said.
Meanwhile, Steven Janssen, general director of Sigedis, the non-profit organisation behind mypension.be in Belgium, said the inclusion of Belgian pensions data in the ETS had succeeded but was so far limited. So far only Belgium and France have included pensions data in the ETS.
“We had a hard time discussing a very modest, small dataset,” Janssen said.
While the ETS currently gave users basic information in pdf form on whether they had a pension in Belgium and when they could take it, he said the site referred them to mypension.be for further information - although he said work was going on to add more Belgian information on the European site.
“I think at that visual level it is doable, but I still believe we should step away from some ideas we had eight, nine, 10 years ago that we will have this joint platform with all this information we have at a national level,” Janssen said.
“No, that will not be the case. Not in my active period, I think,” he said.
