Establishing a European Pension Tracking Service

Establishing a European Pension Tracking Service: first important steps are taken.

Date: 05/2022

ETS foundation is built.

By the end of 2021 we created the important building blocks for the ETS with the FYP Portal. To support users in not losing sight of their pension provision and acquired entitlements even with their professional career in different countries, two elements are important. First, comprehensible, and tailored information that answers the users’ most important questions and encourages them to take necessary actions such as account clarifications. Second, a Pension Tracker that helps users find their entitlements and get an overview of how much they are. Prerequisite for compiling the personal information via the ETS is of course that the existing national PTS (NTS) are “connected”.

Progress made in ETS setting.

The technical means of APIs still is the most appropriate way and developing an interface is not a big issue. According to the EIOPA technical advice financial support would also be possible. Furthermore, EIOPA and our discussions with the NTS group have revealed, that NTSs should use an authentication method recognized in the eIDAS framework to enable mobile users to access their systems directly or through the ETS. The emerging systems in Germany and Austria will fulfil this requirement.

Next step is a solution on fitting data structure and start of the roll out.

For the remainder of the project, we will continue the joint work on a suitable and feasible data structure, allowing the presentation of entitlements from different countries in Europe within a contextualized overview, in a way that is understandable but also reliable for users.

As proposed by EIOPA, we plan to concretize this European data model and develop it together with the NTS involved. Here, we continue to follow the original proposal to implement the concept of a consolidated pension overview in the rollout phase from a functional and technical point of view. This step- by- step approach will be necessary since it requires the connection of further PTS besides Belgium to fill this overview with data. However, the option to create a personal provider’s list manually and make use of the provisional dashboard version will play a role until it is possible to obtain data from all countries. The general information on the individual countries and how to deal with mobile careers in matters of old-age provision must also be completed step by step.

Extract from Intermediate Report: Establishing the European Tracking Service on Pensions Project