As part of the recommendations set out in its White Paper “An Agenda for Adequate, Safe and Sustainable Pensions”, the European Commission set up the Track and Trace your Pension in Europe (TTYPE) project. Under this project, six pension providers aim to develop a cost-effective European pension tracking system that offers sufficient “added value” to entice providers to join by assessing best practices already in place across Europe.
The report compiled by the TTYPE project concluded that a not-for-profit entity partially funded by the Commission should be launched to coordinate a European tracking system (ETS), which would build on existing tracking services put in place by member states.
The tracking system would provide European citizens with an online overview of their accrued pension rights. The system could be crucial to pensioners as it enables them to track their pensions over a lifetime. Its importance is underlined by the increasing number of employees working part of their life in different countries and maybe 'leaving' pension rights behind.
The report found that already a number of other EU member state offered similar systems, but most member states were still undeveloped in that sense. The aim is to help those countries set up systems to be more transparent about individual pension rights. In countries where a national tracking service was not in place – such as Spain, Portugal or Italy – the ETS could either take the place of a national provider or assist in the launch of a national system. Presently, the system would cover the first and second pillars only, but work will be continued to find ways to include also third pillar in the near future.
TTYPE urged the Commission not to use EU-level legislation to establish the ETS, pointing out that a “bottom-up” voluntary approach had received broad support among the stakeholders. However, in some countries, legislative measures could be helpful or even necessary to enable providers to connect to the ETS, but such steps should be decided by the individual member states.