Helping to build Scotland’s digital expertise
Blog written by Anthony Rafferty, Managing Director at Origo
This week Origo was delighted to welcome Kate Forbes, Minister for Public Finance and Digital Economy to our Edinburgh headquarters to talk about the critical tech-based services Origo delivers for the financial services sector, as well as our commitment to the future generations through our apprenticeship scheme.
We wanted Ms Forbes to see the important work being developed in Scotland and how we as a company invest in our digital skills, including development of relevant apprenticeships, to enable us to deliver industry critical services to the rest of the UK.
Origo is committed to developing digital skills both within the Scottish FinTech sector and within the company, and as well as being introduced to staff generally, we were pleased to be able to introduce Ms Forbes specifically to our apprentices and Cyber Security graduate apprentice, Taylor McAuley.
As Cyber Resilience is important to Scotland’s digital economy, Ms Forbes was also briefed on Origo’s digital ID service, called Unipass, that is used by 8 out 10 financial advisers in the UK to securely access digital services from financial providers and platforms.
We were also proud to provide a demonstration of Origo’s world-leading Pension Finder Service for the Government’s Pensions Dashboard project. The role of Pensions Dashboards is to find and display an individual’s pension savings on one screen and is intended to encourage people to engage with and, where appropriate, take action on their retirement income planning.
Origo has been heavily involved in the Pensions Dashboard project from the outset in 2014 and we are excited by the potential for Pensions Dashboard to not only benefit millions of individuals and potentially improve their financial outcomes, but also help to drive further innovation by facilitating an open pensions environment.
Commenting on her visit to our Edinburgh headquarters, Ms Forbes said:
“Origo looks set to reinforce Scotland’s reputation for high quality and innovative digital skills and services. The FinTech is investing in our youth through development and support of apprentices and a graduate apprentice as well as recruiting from a specialist digital academy, Code Clan.
“Origo’s innovative Pension Finder Service will be critical to the Pensions Dashboard project and will also enable other and different FinTechs to get involved in delivering technology such as user interfaces and integration services.
“Scotland is a highly competitive business location, with investment built around the quality of innovation and the digital skills of our workforce. Companies such as Origo can play a big part in making Scotland a centre of digital excellence.”
Alastair Ross, Head of Public Policy (Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland) for the Association of British Insurers, also attended the Minister’s visit. He added:
“Millions of savers stand to benefit from a pensions dashboard system ”“ an initiative with cross-party support and the backing of consumer groups ”“ which will give everyone much easier access to information about their own retirement prospects. The ABI, having led a cross-industry group of pension providers, pension schemes and FinTech companies, has already delivered a great deal of the work needed to make Dashboards a reality and we look forward to continuing this collaboration with Government.”
Origo was formed 30 years ago in Edinburgh, making us one of the UK’s longest established FinTechs and we are proud of our long history at the forefront of innovation in Scotland’s and the UK’s financial services industries.
We are dedicated to improving the financial services industry’s operating efficiencies, lowering costs for market participants and improving outcomes for consumers. We work collaboratively with government, other industry bodies as well as product providers, platforms, financial advisers, portals and software suppliers, to find new ways to cut costs and make processes more efficient.
Pensions Dashboards ”“ a positive step forward for the nation’s financial wellbeing
By Anthony Rafferty, MD of Edinburgh-based Fintech, Origo
Improving the overall wellbeing of citizens is becoming and ever more important focus of government, an important element of which is financial wellbeing ”“ the vision being a society where people make the most of their money and pensions through being more financially aware and equipped.
Technology has an important part to play in this, notably in respect of the implementation of the Pensions Dashboards. Primarily, dashboards are about enabling individuals to find and view all their pensions in one place, thereby increasing engagement with their long term savings and retirement planning.
Last week the DWP published its Pensions Dashboards paper, which is the Government’s response to the consultation that ended in December 2018. It sets out the practical steps necessary to implement Dashboards, starting with the establishment of an industry delivery group by the end of the summer under the new Money and Pensions Service (MPAS).
Some initial commentator reaction to the paper suggested the project wasn’t being moved on fast enough, but the paper is what we expected at this stage in the project and we see it as a positive step forward. In the paper, government clearly stated its intention to introduce Dashboards as quickly as possible’.
The four key elements necessary to make the Pensions Dashboards a reality are governance, compulsion to provide data, state pension and digital architecture. Next steps for all of these elements have been addressed in the paper, which we see as good news.
What’s more, through the consultation, government was able to test its proposals with the industry, consumer groups and other interested parties. Some 125 organisations gave feedback and the paper says the vast majority’ of them agreed with the suggested approach.
This approach includes establishing a single Pension Finder Service ”“ the core architecture that orchestrates an individual’s search for their pension data across all pensions companies and which displays their data on the dashboard they have chosen to use.
Origo has taken a leading role in the project from the start, quickly demonstrating how the technology could meet the government’s policy intent and objectives. We have built and scale-tested the central components to more than handle the 15 million and more potential requests the service could receive. Furthermore, we believe that the digital architecture can be deployed quickly to meet the stated timescales.
Through the DWP paper, government has given dashboards the green light. The task now is for the industry to help MAPS and the delivery group take the project forward to launch. It is a most exciting challenge and one that can have a significant positive effect on the wellbeing of this nation’s retirement savers.
An Origo and Fintech milestone
By Anthony Rafferty, Managing Director of Edinburgh-based Fintech Origo
This month marks a proud moment for Origo and a distinct milestone in Fintech history, namely the 10thanniversary of the launch of the Options Transfers service.
Origo was established in 1989 as a not-for-profit organisation with the remit to help the industry improve its efficiencies, cut its costs and improve the service to consumers. The Options Transfers service was launched in December 2008 to help improve the transfer times for pensions for consumers and the industry.
And the market certainly needed improving. At that time transfers of pensions, largely between pension providers and from pensions into annuities, was taking on average 50 working days.
From launch Options Transfers immediately started to cut down those times. The current and long-standing average transfer time is now just 11 calendardays, including the time required for banks to process monies through BACS.
In developing the Options Transfers service, Origo worked closely with the industry to revamp what was a largely manual process, and re-engineered it through the creation of new frameworks* and technology. These new legal and technological developments were instrumental in swiftly helping to reduce the time taken to transfer.
But the work didn’t stop there. We established user and steering group forums, working with the pensions companies within the large Options Transfers community, to monitor and review their transfer performance, which continues to help drive further performance improvements even today.
And, following its success with pensions, Options Transfers was quickly upgraded to support individual savings account (ISA) and general investment account (GIA) transfers, as well as occupational transfers. It is also the only complete transfers service in the industry, enabling secure and speedy transfers of pensions, GIAs and ISAs.
The service also helps pension schemes and third-party administrators to effect bulk transfers of pension members, where for example a scheme changes administrator or an employer changes scheme.
Furthermore, the users of Options Transfers are part of a trusted community ”“ over 120 financial services companies use the service ”“ focussed on improving their operations and delivering better service to the consumer. The Options Transfers user group and steering group feed into the service to ensure we are delivering what the industry needs including complete readiness ahead of any regulatory changes, the Pensions Freedoms being a significant case in point.
Above all, Origo’s Options Transfers service is focussed on improving outcomes for the industry and consumers and we are proud that since launch, we have transferred over £160bn for the industry, saved the industry over £600 million and importantly, saved consumers over 225 million transfer days.
10 years of Options Transfers service: Top 10 facts
- Options has transferred over £160bn in pensions, ISAs and GIAs for the industry
- 3.25 million pension transfers have been completed since launch
- 40,000 transfers have been processed each month since pensions freedoms
- The average transfer through Options takes 11 calendar days
- The fastest transfer processing completed by a ceding provider has been less than a minute
- 1.2 million transfers by ceding providers took place in less than 4 days
- Options has saved consumers 225 million transfer days
- Options has saved the industry over £600 million
- Close to 120 financial services companies use the service
- Origo Options is the longest running complete pension and ISA transfer service.
*Since 2017, the Origo Standards and Common Declarations have been operated by Criterion. The Common Declarations are free to use: https://www.criterion.org.uk/what-criterion-offers/
Scotland’s Minister for Trade, Investment and Innovation visits fintech Origo
Blog written by Anthony Rafferty Managing Director at Origo.
Origo was delighted this week to welcome Ivan McKee, Scotland’s Minister for Trade, Investment and Innovation to our Edinburgh headquarters.
He visited to talk about the work we do on behalf of the UK financial services industry, in particular to see a demonstration of our world-leading solution for the Pensions Dashboard and to hear about the important work being developed in Scotland to make the Pensions Dashboard a reality.
The purpose of the Pensions Dashboard is to find and display an individual’s pension savings on one screen and is intended to encourage people to engage with and, where appropriate, take action on their retirement income planning.
In his official comment on the visit, Mr McKee pointed out that Scotland is
“a highly competitive business location, with investment built around the quality of our research and innovation as well as the skills of our workforce.”
He added:
“Origo looks set to reinforce our reputation as a centre of excellence for financial services and FinTech by transforming the sector’s operating efficiencies. This includes the introduction of their Pensions Dashboard which will allow members of workplace pension schemes to see all of their pension savings at the same time in one private, secure place.”
At Origo, we are excited by the potential for Pensions Dashboard to not only benefit millions of consumers and potentially improve their financial outcomes, but also to help to drive further innovation in the pensions market by facilitating an open pensions environment.
We have been at the heart of the Dashboard project since its announcement in 2014, responsible for helping develop and prototype the core technology ”“ the Pension Finder Service ”“ and we were selected to provide a prototype to the HM Treasury sponsored Pensions Dashboard Prototype Project, which was the project managed by the Association of British Insurers (ABI).
More recently we provided input to the Department for Work & Pensions’ Feasibility Study and we have continued to develop the technological solution to an advanced state of readiness ”“ testing to an anticipated 15 million users, for example.
Our remit from our foundation in 1989 (making us one of the UK’s longest established FinTechs in Scotland and the UK) has been to improve the financial services industry’s operating efficiencies, lowering costs for market participants and improving outcomes for consumers.
In this respect we work collaboratively with government, other industry bodies as well as product providers, platforms, financial advisers, portals and software suppliers, to find new ways to cut costs and make processes more efficient.
Other industry-critical work we have carried out, for example, has enabled significant reduction in the amount of time it takes to transfer pensions (from c.50 working days to an average of 11 calendar days) and ISAs, as well as delivering and servicing digital IDs for 8 out 10 financial advisers in the UK.
The Minister met staff around the building and we talked also about Origo’s aspirations for the future of FinTech in Scotland and the UK, which we believe is very bright indeed.
Scaling up to meet Pension Dashboard demand
This blog has been written by Anthony Rafferty, Managing Director at Origo.
As the fintech tasked with improving the financial services industry’s operating efficiencies, Origo has been involved in Pensions Dashboard developments since 2014. During this time, as well as developing prototypes, we have also been working on delivering a systems architecture that is scalable to meet the anticipated launch and future usage levels by consumers.
The Pensions Dashboard will be both a brand new and free service pertinent to millions of people in the UK, which means there is a high likelihood that it will receive significant volumes of requests when it goes live.
Indeed, our analysis* shows that Pensions Dashboard must be ready to support at least 15 million consumers accessing their pensions data. This figure of 15 million is also closely aligned with discussions that we have held with providers/banks who operate consumer-facing platforms.
Therefore, the infrastructure underpinning the Pensions Dashboard must be built from the outset to support significant volumes of consumers from day one, cope with peaks and troughs in usage, and scale to the target of 15 million consumers.
Not surprisingly, one of the main concerns of those responsible for delivery of this critical project has been 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.
So, a vital part of the work we have been doing in developing the find’ service ”“ the process of the Dashboard which, with consumer consent, orchestrates the calls to all pension providers to check if they have a matching policy for the consumer ”“ has been to successfully scale test for that anticipated usage by 15 million active consumers all wanting to find their pensions.
We have benchmarked our solution against example test scenarios and factors, including:
â— A 15 million user population;
â— 80% of these users active onPensions Dashboard(s) on a given day;
â— Invoking an additional find’ request every 30 days;
â— 200 pension provider systems (or end points’) in the ecosystem.
As Kenneth May, Chief Architect at Origo, explains this required analysis of the performance and stability of the ‘find’ process at high volume. “Averaged out over a day, this testing 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.”
Needless to say, we are delighted with the progress we’re making on behalf of consumers, with our recent testing proving that the solution scales.
The offering 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
We have not achieved this alone. It has been done working in collaboration with providers and industry bodies over the years, as well as with the support from our strategic technology partners ”“ MuleSoft and ForgeRock. But now, having successfully tested the plumbing of the Pensions Dashboard, for us the technology is ready for 15 million consumers.
First Minister praises “expertise and talent” of Edinburgh FinTech Origo
This blog was written by Anthony Rafferty, Managing Director at Origo.
Scottish Fintech and Insuretech received much praise from Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at the recent ABI Annual Conference and we were delighted to come in for a specific mention in respect of our thought leadership on the Pensions Dashboard initiative, currently being run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
We were encouraged to hear the First Minister say that she and her government were keen to support companies that are “active in the Fintech field” and pleased to be cited by her as “one example of the expertise and talent that we have in our Insuretech sector.” Expertise, she added, on which government wants to build ”“ part of which initiative was the setting up last year of Fintech Scotland, a body which we at Origo firmly support.
Asked specifically how she saw the future role for Fintechs like Origo in Scotland in serving the rest of the UK in such pivotal industry projects as the Pensions Dashboard, Nicola Sturgeon said, “I think the future is bright and strong for companies like yours in Scotland.”
The Pensions Dashboard will allow consumers to access information on their pensions, wherever they may be, in one place. It is an initiative of enormous ambition and significant social purpose.
Pensions Minister Guy Opperman has tasked the Department for Work and Pensions with taking forward the development of the Pensions Dashboard, and a feasibility study is due to be published by the end of March 2018.
However, the pensions industry will need to be ready to respond quickly if it is to meet the Pension Minister’s challenge of a 2019 launch.
Origo is a not-for-profit financial technology company which is run by the industry, for the consumer. We were involved in developing a Pension Finder Service for the prototype Dashboard, which was demonstrated to the industry in April 2017. The Pension Finder Service is, in effect, the engine which takes the request for pension data from the consumer, delivers it to the pension company and then conveys the return data to the Dashboard interface ”“ another element of the project, which displays the information to the pension holder.
While the feasibility study has been ongoing, we have been continuing to work on the necessary technology and we are confident we can establish the central architectural components this year which will support the required Industry integration effort for a 2019 launch. Testing of our Pension Finder Service is being undertaken at population scale and we stand ready to deliver.
We believe that the Pensions Dashboard will be transformative in helping engage consumers with the vital information required to plan for better long-term saving and retirement outcomes. We can’t wait to see the industry’s collaborative work on this come to fruition.
About Origo
Origo is the not-for-profit FinTech company dedicated to improving connectivity between financial services companies, boosting efficiencies, improving performance and reducing integration costs for industry participants, while significantly improving financial outcomes for consumers.