In 1922, an engineering firm from Middlesbrough, a small industrial town in the North-East of England, put in a tender for a building contract. The name of the company was Dorman Long, and they had built up a formidable reputation in the steel industry, but this particular project was a little outside of their comfort zone. 10,478 miles outside of their comfort zone, to be precise. Dorman Long won the contract, and on 19 March 1932 the finished product was opened to the public. The Sydney Harbour Bridge stands to this day as a testament to the capacity of the people of Middlesbrough to achieve greatness. 

I was born and raised in Middlesbrough. My late Grandad worked in the Dorman museum. The spirit of that company’s endeavour runs through the veins of us Middlesbrough folk. 

I’d like to think that I bring some of this spirit to the table in PensionSync’s own engineering projects. Our Sydney Harbour Bridge is the PensionSync Dashboard - the UK’s only one-stop-shop for payroll-to-pension processing, designed with efficiency at its core, so that payroll teams can ditch laborious manual pension processes in favour of a smooth, effortless digital flow. Imagine swimming across Sydney Harbour every day and then, suddenly, there’s a bridge. For busy payroll teams, the switch to using PensionSync is the same level of revolutionary change.

The PensionSync Dashboard, launched in June 2020, effectively replaces the PensionSync Scheme Management Tool, which has served PensionSync customers loyally for several years. 

It’s not that the PensionSync Scheme Management Tool isn’t good - it’s that the PensionSync Dashboard is better. The Scheme Management Tool provides granular alerts which tell you when something happens on your pension scheme. The Dashboard provides at-a-glance monitoring so you can see exactly what has happened on all your pension schemes, instantly. The Scheme Management Tool is a ferry crossing - it gets you to the other side, and the journey is perfectly pleasant. The Dashboard is the Sydney Harbour Bridge - it gets you there quicker, and the experience will be so memorable you’ll tell your friends all about it. 

But why would I go all the way to Sydney, just to visit a bridge? Especially when I could go from Middlesbrough to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (40 miles away) and see literally the exact same bridge? The Tyne Bridge (below) was completed by Dorman Long several years earlier and is virtually identical to its better-known Australian counterpart.

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The PensionSync Dashboard isn’t the whole story. Like Sydney has the Opera House, Port Jackson Bay and Bondi Beach, PensionSync has many compelling features: automatic error corrections, reporting at the click of a button, automatic payment approval for all pension schemes including Nest. Like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the PensionSync Dashboard is more than just a bridge - the Dashboard is a landmark platform which empowers payroll teams to access all the great features of PensionSync, built by our incredible engineering team to remove the pain from payroll-to-pension processing. 

In 2019, PensionSync was acquired by Australian software company KeyPay, which is headquartered in Sydney. Thanks to Dorman Long and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the PensionSync Dashboard is probably only the second most significant engineering project linking Middlesbrough to Sydney - although try telling that to the happy payroll teams who no longer have to swim the payroll-to-pension processing harbour every day.

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