Date: 06/2021

National Tracking Services (NTS) play a vital role in the development of the ETS. On the 20th of April, the ETS consortium organized the 3rd meeting with representatives of various different NTSs for an online discussion.  The assembly meeting started with sharing recent developments from each of the NTSs. Rather interesting to get an update on what national counterparts are working on! Claudia Wegner-Wahnschaffe, the Project Manager of the ETS, presented some recent developments and results of the project. Thereafter, Dr. André Geilenkothen from AON Germany shared his insights on the feasibility and state of play of the development of a German NTS. Finally, two guests from EIOPA presented the state-of-play on the call for advice on best practice recommendations for the setup of NTSs.

The setting-up of a Pension Tracking System in Germany has recently started

In his presentation, André Geilenkothen explained the background, decision process and progress made on the development of a German national tracking system. The aim of this initiative, which started in 2018 with a feasibility study, is to provide all German citizens with reliable and complete pension information. The system should inform citizens on whether they have accrued sufficient and/or sustainable retirement income. The system is likely to work with a multi-layer approach. The first layer will contain fundamental information such as an overview of the pension providers. This will be supplemented with additional information concerning one's benefit statements and contact data.  In other words, the service should help to raise pension awareness.

Pension/retirement information can be rather difficult to read and understand, therefore it is important that the system will be as complete as possible with easy to understand and comparable information. February of this year marked the start of the German NTS project and the intended go-live of the pilot stage is planned for December 2023. As national tracking services are an essen-tial part of the ETS project we are looking forward to see the future developments in the estab-lishment of this system.

Scope of EIOPA’s work on best practice for Pension Tracking

Another interesting presentation that was given during the NTS meeting was shared by two experts from EIOPA, concerning the European Commission’s request for technical advice on the development of best practices for national pension tracking systems and pension dashboard from December last year. The Commission requests the technical advice of EIOPA by December 2021, in order to fill a gap in the current monitoring process of pension adequacy in the EU Member States.

However, the subject is different than the purpose of the ETS, as the project's main focus is on helping mobile workers. Yet, the main message of EIOPA's call for advice could support the work on an ETS. The ambition of the EIOPA project is to provide member states with concrete principles, best practices, guidance, and a roadmap on establishing tracking systems. It will not provide a pro-totype tracking system. But their work could help to establish more NTSs in EU member states which will contribute to the success of the ETS. Furthermore, the scope of the work areas of EIOPA include the back-end compatibility of NTSs with the ETS. EIOPA will launch a public consultation during the summer and aims to publish the technical advice by December 1st.

To conclude, the ETS/NTSs meeting of 20th April was highly relevant and interesting. Furthermore, it provided the opportunity for timely discussions on the next steps of the future ETS.