Insurance Europe has published its response to a consultation by the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) on its draft technical advice to the European Commission on the development of pension dashboards and data collection.
Insurers support transparency and agree with the objective of having a clearer picture of the current pension savings landscape. However, it is concerning that EIOPA’s proposals seem to ignore the fact that pensions are, to a large extent, a purely national issue. There is therefore no single approach to achieving pension adequacy and sustainability, and the lack of agreed EU definitions prevents meaningful harmonised reporting.
Moreover, EIOPA’s proposals to collect more data would burden both pension providers — and specifically insurers — and national authorities with significant extra costs. Furthermore, these proposals go far beyond the scope of the Commission’s call for advice, namely the development of pension dashboards.
Therefore, before EIOPA recommends additional data collection, it should first consider the data, indicators and benchmarks that are already available at national level. It is also important for EIOPA not to confuse “availability” with the “comparability” of data. In EIOPA’s draft technical advice, it often says that data is not available, whereas in fact very often the data is available but only at national level.
The insurance industry also wishes to express reservations about some of EIOPA’s objectives in relation to a pension dashboard. While monitoring of national pension systems is crucial, comparing and ranking national systems is not a desirable goal.