Legal & General (L&G) Retail Retirement has purchased a 100% stake in MyFutureNow – which specialises in pension pot tracing and consolidation – for an undisclosed price.
The acquisition of the firm, Finovation, which trades as MyFutureNow completed last week. It will support L&G’s Retail Retirement and defined contribution businesses by delivering a view of pension and retirement savings for existing and potential customers, L&G said.
This includes members’ individual pots, workplace savings, and underlying investment assets in a similar way to the government’s proposed pensions dashboard, which is due to be launched by the Money and Pensions Service towards the end of this year in a non-commercial form.
Using personal data, employment details and provider knowledge, the MyFutureNow service traces pots and provides updated details to customers. According to L&G, this can be used either as a tracing service or a way of creating a single “dashboard view” of an individual’s pension savings.
L&G Retail Retirement chief executive Chris Knight said the firm “fully supports the government’s pensions dashboard initiative”, but the reality is that “it may be many years before full coverage is realised”.
He added: “Wherever they are in their retirement journey – from beginning to save for retirement to planning retirement income solutions – customers need the tools and guidance to make informed decisions about the most suitable options for their personal circumstances, lifestyle and retirement goals.”
He further noted that once MyFutureNow is integrated, “it will remove the headache of tracking down old pension plans from past employers, enabling consumers to make retirement decisions using all their available sources of retirement income”.
The government’s feasibility study for the dashboard, published in December 2018, outlined plans for an initial non-commercial dashboard, which could be followed by more commercial dashboards over time.