Medically underwritten mortality studies
The need
Pension scheme sponsors and trustees must assess the value of their defined benefit pension schemes for accounting, ongoing funding purposes and regulatory purposes. As part of this, assumptions have to be made about the mortality of scheme members. Most traditional methods of assessing mortality are fundamentally flawed. They rely on the assumptions of standard tables, and analysis of often obsolescent postcode data, rather than solid information – and can therefore vary wildly. The resulting business impact can be significant, risking overstated accounting disclosures and unnecessarily high contribution levels; for trustees, investment strategies and buy-out plans can be materially different.
The service
MorganAsh provides an alternative approach to setting mortality assumptions for scheme valuations which can deliver a different perspective. We assess the health of individual scheme members and then work with actuaries and trustees to formulate a more appropriate mortality assumption for pension schemes, using long-established life-insurance, medical-underwriting techniques. This evidence-based approach has typically shown variations of 5–10% in valuations, resulting in changes in valuations of millions of pounds.
Features
- Telephone surveys are undertaken by our qualified nurses, who are highly experienced in working with consumers.
- We provide a well-defined, structured, proven service.
- We provide you with an evidence-based approach to setting mortality assumptions, which is based on real data from the actual scheme membership.
Benefits
- We provide evidence-based, improved-accuracy, scheme-funding and accounting valuations.
- Meets The Pension Regulator’s requirements for an evidence-based methodology.
- We can help resolve differences of opinion between scheme sponsors and trustees during valuation assumption negotiations.
- We can help companies to prepare for future buy-in/-out transactions.
- Using medically underwritten mortality studies improves risk management.
- We can help facilitate mergers and acquisitions activity.
Gathering scheme data
We encourage people to participate voluntarily in direct benefits pension scheme revaluations by communicating the benefits and the process clearly, in advance. To ensure high participation rates, it’s essential to gain the confidence of those we need to interview. We do this by sending a letter which outlines our role clearly, backed with a video to both reassure them and enable the process to be more easily understood. The video can be unbranded – or we can brand it with the logo of the employer or scheme provider. Watch the video.
The video’s script
It’s a long time since you started working – and your employer began squirrelling away money for your pension.
And, as your pension has grown, times have changed. The world’s changed. You’ve changed too.
To better manage our pensions – not just for you, but for all of our customers – we need to understand these changes.
So, we want to ask for your help.
We’d like to ask you a few questions: about you, your health and how things have changed for you. We do this using a simple questionnaire and interviews over the phone.
We’re not trying to sell you anything. We’d just like to chat to you. In fact, the interviews are undertaken by a trained nurse, working for an independent research company.
We just want to build a clearer picture of our customers’ lives. Because the more we know, the better we can make our pensions.
Our questions are simple, and easy to answer – designed to gather up-to-date information about people’s health and lifestyle.
Any medical information remains confidential – the researchers don’t share this, even with your pension company or its trustees.
And your involvement doesn’t affect your own pension in any way. But it will help us to provide the best service for all of our customers.
We don’t need much of your time – but we do value your involvement.
Help us to provide for a better future, for you and those you worked with.
Scheme data is sensitively gathered by a team of medical professionals, working with secure information systems which have been developed specifically for the purpose by MorganAsh.
Find out more
Medically underwritten mortality studies are suitable for all final-salary pension schemes – particularly those with under 1,000 members, where the population is too small and unlikely to be represented by standard national averages.
Whether in the process of agreeing a pension scheme valuation or not, medically underwritten mortality studies could help to improve the accuracy of results.
E-mail us at info@morganash.com, or call us – and we will be happy to chat.