Having spent two weeks off combining seeing Mötley Crüe and the Ashes and getting my knee looked at*, I return to discover that the Mansion House speech this year has dumped a load of consultations over the wall on pensions. Excellent, I genuinely like this stuff. Sort of… As you will expect, I am concentrating […]

This week the DWP published the snappily titled Review of the Occupational and Personal Pension Schemes (Conditions for Transfers) Regulations 2021 (SI 2021/1237),  i.e. the results of their review to see if the rule brought in to prevent pensions scams is bringing in major delays to pensions transfers.  Conclusion from the DWP: only 1% of […]

On the back of the most recent announcement that Pensions Dashboard is to go back to 2026 there has been quite the call for “simplifying” it all.  In IT delivery parlance we call this Minimum Viable Proposition (MVP).  So here is my view on what the MVP for Pensions Dashboards might look like.   Do we […]

Like the best Iron Maiden tracks, this long and epic five parter on Open Finance must come to a finish.  So it’s time for some hardcore futurology and look at how Open Finance will change the long term savings industry.  And what might well stay exactly the same. Consolidation, lots of consolidation Let’s do the […]

There are two things to understand before I answer this question.   Financial aggregation tools It’s a pretty safe bet that firms that already use open banking to provide information to customers will add open finance data on Pensions and ISAs.  Add a zoopla feed to estimate the property equity value and you can build a […]

Part three of this epic on Open Finance, right up there with the guitar solo at the end of ‘Free Bird’ by Skynyrd. I will now cover the boring and deeply unsexy part of Open Finance: all the work that product providers and platforms will have to do to make it a reality. By which […]

Part two of my great opus on Open Finance covers the functional aspect of what it may and maybe should do in the long term savings market.  And no interminably long keyboard solos. What data? This is the actual product, as it were.   What information will a customer be able to easily share with a third […]

This post is the first of an epic five part “concept album” on Open Finance in the Long Term Savings market.  (Still a better concept than the stuff YES produced in the 70s)  In my other posts I will cover what providers will have to do, what data and functionality will be offered, the uses […]

For me an interesting part of my work is how we might see open finance in the Long Term Savings sector develop over the next 5-10 years.  And who will drive it?  Within government there is little to no enthusiasm for Open Banking and Pensions Dashboard governance to merge. So the question is does Open Finance […]

Having a wee gap between client work, I have spent the last couple of weeks engaging in some of my hobbies.  These include watching epic Chinese martial arts dramas, painting toy soldiers and listening to terrible European power metal songs about tank battles and Vikings.  Actually that’s not true, metal songs about Vikings are awesome.   […]