Pensions & benefits

Mortality, longevity and demographic modelling

Understanding longevity risk is a fundamental building block for managing a DB pension scheme. Getting it right will lead to better member outcomes.

Unlocking mortality trends: A key to better outcomes

Our latest longevity report shares clear insights intro mortality trends and explains how rigorous assessments of mortality assumptions can lead to better outcomes for your pension scheme members.

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Navigating demand and supply in the buy-in and buy-out market

Our pension risk transfer report reveals that market dynamics have broadly stabilised as market volumes reach what we view as 'cruising altitude'. We explore regulatory, market and industry developments, insurer pricing, and why the question for most schemes is 'when' not 'if' they move to insurance.

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Accounting for pensions

Making the most of multi-billion £ pension surpluses

Our annual accounting for pensions report presents a concise analysis of the pensions facts, figures and trends revealed by FTSE100 companies reporting in 2023.

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Chart your own course

Taking control of your journey

Our sixth annual report is built around the results of our annual survey of the DB pension scheme market and provides insights across a whole range of areas of DB strategy and endgame planning.

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Our longevity advice uniquely draws from our multi-disciplinary team, combining actuarial modelling with real-world health insights to provide trustees and employers with robust forward-looking scenarios to help them make better decisions.

We tailor our advice to our clients’ specific circumstances, providing them with both reliable insights and a better understanding of their risks.

Understanding longevity risk helps clients achieve better outcomes for their members – whether it is changing the pace of a journey plan, assessing the value of an insurance transaction, understanding whether a surplus could be used for enhancing member benefits, setting appropriate accounting assumptions, or ensuring investment hedging or cashflow matching strategy is accurate.

We work closely with our actuarial team to ensure all our clients benefit from fully-informed assumptions setting.

We also advise large pension schemes on a standalone basis who wish to benefit from the valuable longevity insights our team can provide.

Though our unique approach, we can help:

Form a robust assessment of suitable current mortality rates for a scheme's membership using our in-house model, LifeAnalytics. This combines the profile of the scheme’s membership with recent mortality experience. Our modelling approach is comparable to that of leading insurers and reinsurers.
Analyse how longevity rates may change in the future. We combine historical trends with real world insights to provide a best-estimate assumption tailored to a scheme.
Understand what plausible future pathways could transpire to give a clear understanding of the risk associated with how long members may live. We consider questions such as:
- When will the NHS recover from its current strains, and what impact will this have?
- How will the future look for different subsets of the population, tailored to a scheme's membership?
- How will the treatment and prevalence of diseases such as cardiovascular disease progress into the future?
- How can different future pathways be expressed in the CMI mortality projections model?

Our longevity advice can support a range of decision-making, including:

Setting appropriate mortality assumptions for scheme funding or accounting purposes
Undertaking comprehensive estimates and value-for-money analysis of buy-in or longevity swap pricing
Setting appropriate longevity risk reserves to support a long-term run-off strategy
Forming a thorough assessment of your liability profile to support a cashflow-driven investment strategy.