The objective of Track and Trace Your Pension in Europe (TTYPE) is to allow E.U. citizens to find all relevant information about their pensions regardless of when and where they worked and accumulated pension rights. TTYPE’s European Tracking Service (ETS) extends and builds on existing National Tracking Services (NTS) that store the pension records of an employee along his/her changes in employers in one same country. After a planning phase that ended in June 2016, deployment should begin but it is contingent on adequate financing being found.

The scope of the project includes all of the European Economic Area (EEA), i.e. the 26 E.U. member countries, Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland.

The ETS is to be deployed in three stages: first of proof-of-concept (Belgium, The Netherlands, Scandinavian countries, Poland); then neighboring countries (Austria, France, etc.) and finally the rest of the European Economic Area.

The ETS is to be operated by a body called STEP, which is not fully funded at this time. Of the estimated €20m development and running costs for the first five years of operation, 17m remain to be found and may be financed by the European Commission. The per-member cost is estimated to be 3 cents per year, that is €1.20 over the course of a person’s entire 40-year career. STEP is to launch before the end of 2016 a tender for a provider of TPA services to run TTYPE.

The planning phase was executed by the TTYPE consortium that included Danemark’s PKA, The Netherland’s PGGM, APG, MN and Syntrus Achmea, and Germany’s B&CE and SOKA-Bau.

This European project will be of great value to people having worked in several E.U. countries over the course of their career. Harmonized pensions across Europe would do away with the need for data consolidation as offered by TTYPE. But as convergence in national pension systems remains an elusive goal, the TTYPE ETS is a significant improvement over having to deal with a great number of NTSes; and it may drive the development of a NTS in countries still lacking one.

And even if TTYPE is never implemented, which would be a shame, we are still left with a number of new acronyms to play with: TTYPE, STEP, ETS/NTS. And maybe the ILO’s ISSA could take a leaf out of TTYPE’s book and think about developing a GPS (Global Pensions information System).

The TTYPE website can be found here. The final report can be downloaded here.

ILO: International Labor Organization, part of the United Nations system. ISSA: International Social Security Association.