For the chief executive of Gretel, a fintech that says it has created an “everything” dashboard for lost assets, the government’s stuttering pensions dashboards project is close to complete implosion — and it might do well to lean on his company.
Considering the latest delay in the dashboards, Duncan Stevens, who set up Gretel in early 2020, says: “We managed to create a dashboard that covers not just pensions but everything, in less than a year for a fraction of the cost.”
Pensions minister Laura Trott put the brakes on the dashboards programme in March — one of a litany of problems the project has faced — saying that more time would be needed to comply with regulation.
Stevens became interested in the concept during his 12 years at wealth management support company Equiniti, where he was involved in the government’s old Dormant Assets Scheme and where he saw firsthand the number of problems with asset recovery.
Fast-forward four years and Gretel is now a fully functioning platform that searches for lost accounts, though it continues to sign on new financial providers. “Having already created most of the functionality that the dashboard is trying to create, and being live now, we could, if the government wanted to change its mind, do it for them,” he says.
A sense of inevitability
The most recent delay announced by the government is likely to be indefinite, a state of affairs Stevens finds “heartbreaking” for people who have invested their careers in the dashboards. A lot of the delay is from the government’s side rather than from the project itself, he says.
Alongside the industry’s frustration, there is a sense of almost inevitability. He believes that many in the industry are “convinced” the dashboards will collapse entirely.
“As a minimum, we’re now talking three years (in delays), so [it will be] 2026 before the public will get any opportunity to search through the government’s dashboard,” Stevens adds, which he says is “unacceptable”.
Some 700,000 people reach retirement age every year — in a three-year period that is more than 2mn people.
The cost is another salient point for comparison. An impact paper from the Department for Work and Pensions suggested in 2019 that the likely ongoing cost of developing the pensions dashboards could be anywhere from £245mn to £1.48bn.
Gretel, on the other hand, has so far spent a more modest £1mn on its dashboard.
"If there was ever a government that was open to reviewing stalled and costly technology and infrastructure projects like the pensions dashboard, this would be the government to do that,” Stevens says.
He adds that if the government does choose to lean on Gretel, “a revised and perhaps even more ambitious pensions dashboard could potentially be delivered to the public by the end of the year”.
The fintech’s name has been taken directly from the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, but unlike the abandoned heroes of the tale Stevens’ pride in his creation is associated with the memory of his father, who died the week following the fintech’s launch and whose final week was spent encouraging Stevens’ gambit.
