MorganAsh

The success of a medically underwritten buy-in is critically dependent on a clear, efficient and well-communicated process to gather medical information from a high proportion of the pensioners who will be covered by the insurance policy.

As market leaders in the medically underwritten buy-in market, Hymans Robertson and MorganAsh have worked together to refresh this process to allow them to deliver their pension scheme clients with a well-structured, efficient and cost-effective process for gathering medical information.

James Mullins, partner and head of buy-out solutions at Hymans Robertson, said: “Many of our pension scheme clients have already benefited from significant early-over advantage in the medically underwritten buy-in market. As this part of the pension risk transfer market continues to grow at pace, it is great to be able to provide even more pension schemes with an easy and cost-effective way to clearly assess the potential merits of a medically underwritten buy-in.

“While medical underwriting can appear to be complex to some, the practices we have built with MorganAsh ensure all complexity is taken care of. These practices are a key reason why we currently have a 100% transaction completion rate.

“Standardisation of the whole medical data-gathering process enables medically underwritten buy-ins to be completed within 2–3 months, with no limit on the size of pension scheme suitable for this process.”

Andrew Gething, managing director of MorganAsh, said, “Working with multiple providers to deliver a competitive and compliant medical underwriting process has had its challenges. However, working with Hymans Robertson we have fine-tuned these procedures to provide a secure, efficient and quick operation that minimises risk for insurers and hence optimises medically underwritten buy-in prices for pension schemes.”

Hymans Robertson’s research shows that:

  • the popularity of medically underwritten buy-ins has grown to such an extent that they represented over 10% of all bulk annuity transactions during the fourth quarter of 2014.
  • medically underwritten buy-in pricing is more than 5% cheaper than traditional buy-in pricing, often close to a pension scheme’s technical provisions reserve.
  • we can expect to see between £500m and £1 billion of medically underwritten buy-in deals completed during 2015, taking total market volumes to in excess of £1.5 billion by the end of 2015.

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