Background

HCB recognises that annuity providers experience difficulty in validating annuity payments in their annuity portfolios. This can be due to a number of reasons, particularly the volume of annuitants.

Often the annuity book will have grown because of acquisition of business or due to the providers' competitiveness in the market at a certain point in time which can lead to unexpected 'clusters' in the age profiles.

The book itself maybe consist of a number of types of annuities such as CPA's, PLA's, bulk buy-out of deferred or pensioners, own individual policy maturities or insured group scheme. Each type of annuitant has its own level of risks together with potential systematic risk within the insurers own processes and procedures.

Some insurers rely on a combination of data matching (via the likes of ONS and DWP) to confirm annuitant existence. Whilst this is known to have been successful from the perspective that the notifications identified where annuitants are deceased tend to be accurate, insurers tend to have no way of determining the "capture rate" of deceased pensioners identified, and consequently, there may be cases where deaths have occurred that are bypassing the system, and hence notification not reaching the insurance office.


Our Service

HCB have developed a number of innovative ways in which our services can be utilised to co-operate with insurers existing verification processes. The key to our service delivery is ensuring that the individual processes are agreed by both parties together with the overall scope of the project. As a result, actions, responsibility and management are fully integrated into one overall project. This enables our clients to determine how much or little needs to be outsourced without compromising the overall the project.

Initially we agree the scope of the project, reporting requirements, authorisation requirements and data specification. The data specification will prioritise the data sets which for example could be by age, size of annuity, changes of bank details or address, or other triggers currently held on the insurers systems. Once all the above have been agreed and the data has been provided and formatted by us, we take the following actions:

     Stage One: Data Matching is undertaken in conjunction with our (or the insurers
     existing) data matching business partner. This will enable us to quickly identify
     pensioners that have changed address or further investigation is required.

     Stage Two: Records are checked against death registers in the UK and Ireland, if a
     positive match is obtained, this is immediately notified to enable the pension payment
     to be suspended.

     Stage Three: Letters are sent to pensioners where the data matching responses are
     returned 'negative'. Responses are individually monitored, and forwarding, or other
     information gained that produces confirmation of new address or whereabouts of the
     pensioner is passed to the insurer.

     Stage Four: The final level of existence checking involves desk based research by
     trained researchers.

     Stage Five: Make scripted telephone calls using pre-determined questions that have
     been agreed in advance by insurers. The basis of the telephone calls will require
     HCB staff to be satisfied that they speak personally to the customer, and ensure that
     all aspects of the payment are correct.


Why appoint HCB

HCB has been providing services to the financial services industry since 1984, offering a wide range of products mainly to Insurance institutions. Whilst for many years this has involved verifying data, tracing and investigating disability claims for major insurance companies, more recently this has expanded into the verification/confirmation of accurate member data for pension schemes.

We believe we can offer a cost effective means of verifying the continued existence of annuitants. HCB also recognises the difficulty of dealing with the inevitable "Gone-Aways" resulting from traditionally sought 'certificates of existence'. We provide an end to end service where these much more difficult cases are investigated as thoroughly as possible, in an efficient and cost effective manner.


Who are HCB

HCB was established in 1984 and consolidated into the existing Group of Companies in 1993. The Group provides claim visiting and claim assessment services to insurers, ill health retirement assessment services and absence management services.

HCB's offices are situated within a gated perimeter fence which is locked when the building is unoccupied. The office building is protected by an alarm system linked to the Police. All paper records are stored in fire resistant cabinets which are locked when the building is not occupied. Keys are stored in a password protected key safe.