Pensions Dashboard successfully tested for 15 million consumers

This target was identified through its industry research published last month, which estimated there could be 15 million consumers accessing and using their Pensions Dashboard.

The solution is the underlying engine that enables consumer requests to be sent to pension providers, schemes and third party administrators, and for pension details to be returned to the consumer-facing dashboard. This includes advanced features such as Delegated Authority (access) for adviser firms.

Kenneth May, chief architect at Origo, said: “We have bench-marked our solution against example test scenarios and factors, including a 15 million user population, 80% of these users active on Pensions Dashboard(s) on a given day, invoking an additional ‘find’ request every 30 days, and 200 pension provider systems in the ecosystem.

“Averaged out over a day, this requires a throughput of just over 1,000 transactions per second to deal with incoming traffic from the Dashboard(s) and to collate responses from pension providers.

“We have tested at more than double this rate to ensure that we can cope with typical usage patterns which have significant peaks during the working day. Our test results give us confidence that we can reliably achieve, exceed and sustain the required throughput and provide a robust low-latency service.”

Anthony Rafferty, Managing Director, Origo added: “We are delighted with the progress we’re making on behalf of consumers. Our recent testing has proven that the solution scales.

“One of the main concerns of those responsible for delivery of this critical project is the sheer complexity in scaling up the central IT infrastructure to deal with this anticipated volume of consumers. It is vital that this is achieved securely, efficiently and at acceptable cost to Government and industry stakeholders.

“Our offering is underpinned by highly scalable world-class technology which orchestrates the finding of pensions securely. It also provides centralised authorisation services to enable dashboard access to the pensions which are found and includes advanced features such as Delegated Authority (access) for advisers, guidance bodies and other trusted parties.

“Working in collaboration with providers and industry bodies over the years, as well as the support from our strategic technology partners – MuleSoft and ForgeRock – has enabled us to deliver and successfully test the plumbing of the pensions dashboard. For us, the technology is ready for 15 million consumers.”