How the UK Pensions Dashboard Project Reached Live Service

Episode notes

Episode 94 of The CTO Podcast. Lucas and Luna examine the engineering behind the UK's Pensions Dashboard programme, which went live in March 2026. They walk through the core technical decisions: a federated data model where the dashboard doesn't centralise pension records but queries over 50,000 provider endpoints via a standardised API, an identity-matching layer that resolves individuals across fragmented legacy systems using a probabilistic matching engine, and the security architecture built around the gov.uk Verify identity platform. They also discuss the programme's scaling challenge: designing for 30 million users within five years, with peak loads during retirement season. Specific numbers covered: the initial 14 provider cohort scaling to 50,000 by 2028, the 99.99 percent uptime requirement for the dashboards availability service, and the matching accuracy target of 98.5 percent for automated identity resolution. The hosts debate whether federated or centralised data models were the right call for a national infrastructure project.

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