SPP: What pensions dashboards can learn from Taylor Swift and Oasis

The pensions industry is working hard to build dashboards, which will come to life in 2025. But the work is mostly behind the scenes. Members won't get access for some time - possibly late 2026.

The plan is that a date will be set, known known as the "Dashboards Available Point" (DAP), and we will given at least 6 months' notice of this. Once it is announced, a new wave of activity will start. The government will publicise the date, while dashboards providers will compete for customers, to get as many people signed up to their dashboard as possible. And pension schemes will gear up for the wave of requests that could start to arrive.

The lesson from pop superstars is that single-date launches are hugely difficult. When tickets go on sale websites crash and customers get frustrated. Dashboards may not be as popular as a sellout tour at Wembley, but having a single date at which everyone wants to do the same thing is just asking for trouble. The government found this out first hand last year when Martin Lewis highlighted buying extra State Pension and the website promptly crashed.

It's thought that there are around 20 million individuals with a pension that will show on dashboards. Experts have suggested that maybe half of these will log on in the first year, and evidence from overseas dashboards shows that usage isn't uniform - most people log on in response to an advertising campaign, such as will happen on launch. So in the first few days and weeks after the DAP we face an unknown, but potentially overwhelming, demand from millions of members logging on.

Even if the websites don't crash, that is just the first challenge. For every member that registers with a dashboard there is a potential phone call or member request coming as well. That could a "possible match", a member that cannot find their scheme, a members realising their information is out of date, or just wanting to know more about their benefits. All of those are most likely to happen the first time a member logs on.

So how do providers deal with a launch that could see a huge spike in demand, before falling back to normal levels?

For ticket sales there is a natural solution – once the tickets have sold the demand vanishes. Pension schemes don't have that luxury – if the phones keep ringing and the emails keep arriving, they all need dealing with. And with dashboards regulations imposing shorter legal timescales than ever before, dashboards queries may have to be prioritised over other actions, such as processing retirements or even paying out death benefits.

There is a simple way to manage this - and again it's one that the pop superstars use – stagger the launch date. Every concert now has pre-sales and pre-pre-sales, with different groups getting access on successive days. They have extra tickets being released, and extra dates being added.

For dashboards a good solution would be to allow access based on age. Evidence from overseas dashboards shows that older members use dashboards more than younger members, and it's self-evident that older members, close to retirement, have most to gain. So perhaps dashboards could be launched individuals over age 60 first? Once the initial spike has passed then it could be opened up to those over age 55, then over 50 and so on.

Younger members would need to wait a little longer, but their pension schemes won't go anywhere in that time, and they have waited a decade for dashboards already. Waiting a few weeks or months longer shouldn't be an issue, particularly if it means that dashboards actually work rather than collapsing under the pressure.

Paul McGlone is the pensions dashboard lead and a former president of the Society of Pension Professionals and a partner at Aon