Ryan FowlerThe Pensions Regulator (TPR) is encouraging the pensions industry to seize the opportunities presented by the Smart Data Challenge Prize, a £600,000 competition launched on 15th January by the Department for Business and Trade in partnership with the Open Data Institute and Smart Data Foundry.
The initiative aims to inspire the development of innovative technologies and apps that use open data to benefit savers, businesses, and the broader economy. It draws on the success of the UK’s open banking sector as a model for fostering innovation and growth in other areas, including pensions.
Lisa Allen, TPR’s director of data services, highlighted the transformative potential of open data for the pensions sector. She said: “Just like open banking benefited the UK economy, open pensions data has the potential to boost innovation, increase efficiency, reduce regulatory burden and improve outcomes for savers. I hope the pensions industry will see the Smart Data Challenge as an opportunity to prove how innovative it is.”
TPR’s digital, data and technology strategy, launched in October, aims to encourage innovation by advocating the use of open data standards, such as application programming interfaces (APIs). These standards facilitate seamless data sharing between systems, reducing administrative duplication and enabling schemes to capture and reuse data efficiently across agencies.
