The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) has been building pilot pension dashboards internally, its chair, Petra Hielkema, has revealed.

Speaking at the PensionsEurope Annual Conference in Brussels today, 25 April, Hielkema explained that since submitting its advice to the European Commission in 2021, it has been “sitting in a draw” in Brussels. However, several European institutions, including EIOPA, have advised that dashboards be developed during the next European Commission.

Hielkema explained that, for dashboards to be successful, data from pillar one (governments) and pillars two and three will be needed – and a mandate from the new commission that overarches this is necessary.

“How do I know and what do I need? I haven’t been waiting for anything to happen, I asked my team to do a pilot,” she said.

“I said: ‘Get all the data you can find – online, public, go to the OECD – what do we have, what is already out there and build dashboards of individual countries internally in EIOPA, not for publication. I want to see how far we can get and if we don’t have the exact data can you build a credible proxy’.

“That is what we did, and it was a very fascinating exercise, we’re just rounding it up. Call it a feasibility study, call it input for the next commission, but what we’ve seen is you can build a dashboard and you do indeed need a different approach per country, they are very different systems but if you bring it all together, our data, OECD, what we can find online, dashboards can be built,” she said.

Currently, seven member states have built a pension tracking system, seven countries are considering it, and Europe is building one.

"In reality, it means that 20 member states, its citizens, cannot go online, fill in their tax or government ID and see where they are with their pensions," she said.

Hielkema’s passion for developing pension dashboards and pension tracking systems across Europe is driven by her desire to close the gender pension gap. She believes that such systems and tools will help to address the gap, which is currently her “main concern” with pension provision.

She believes having data and an overview of pensions will help providers and individuals better save for a pension.

“Women in general get 30 per cent less pension than men and that is a European average; there are big differences. One of the countries with a very large gender gap is the Netherlands. So, it is always best in class for its pension system but maybe not for the gender gap. The risk of poverty for women when living on their pension is 35 per cent larger, so all in all, we can say we have an issue with a very different dispersion across Europe on how big the problem is for the individual citizen because of the huge differences we have in the pension systems.”

---