Brightwell, the primary service provider to one of the UK’s largest private sector defined benefit schemes, has launched a full self-serve online retirement journey for the pension fund’s members.
The service, for BT Pension Scheme, leverages biometric identity verification and automatically diarises and pays out members’ pensions and lump sums. Brightwell said it believes this to be an industry first for a defined benefit scheme.
Brightwell partnered with pensions software provider Procentia and identity verification provider Onfido to introduce digital identity verification and automatic settlement capability, to ensure the whole process can be completed online.
According to Brightwell, BTPS members can use the service to run retirement quotes to decide on their chosen option, confirm their choice, complete the application, verify their identity digitally and submit their application online.
This automatically sets up a settlement case, disinvests any additional voluntary contributions (AVCs) they may have, puts them into payment on their chosen pension start date, and converts them to pensioner status, all without any administrator involvement or manual intervention.
“This will reduce our post volumes, freeing up valuable administrator time”
Andy Whitelaw, deputy head of member services at Brightwell
The system also carries out a set of comprehensive checks on the member’s data and the automated calculation results to provide all the checks and balances that previously were carried out by administrators.
Where they may be discrepancies, Brightwell said one of its administrators can carry out further checks before payments are made.
‘Overwhelmingly positive’
BTPS is one of the largest private sector pension schemes in the UK with over 263,000 members. Its 210,000 pensioners receive £2.6bn (€3bn) in pension payments a year and it has 53,000 deferred members, who are yet to retire.
Each year, between 7,000 and 8,000 BTPS members go through the retirement process, putting their BTPS pension into payment.
Currently, nearly two thirds (61%) complete their retirement application online using the BTPS member portal, which was launched in 2021. But for the final part of the process, members previously had to send copies of identity documents such as passport or driving licence through the post together with their pension application form, including a wet signature.
Andy Whitelaw, deputy head of member services at Brightwell, said that since launch, over 125,000 members have registered for the BTPS online portal and the feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive”.
He said: “With so many members choosing to start their retirement journey online, we wanted to put the final piece of the jigsaw in place, introducing digital identity verification so the whole process can be completed easily, securely and quickly online.”
Whitelaw expects that the majority of members coming up to retirement will choose to use this service for the convenience and security it offers.
He added: “This will reduce our post volumes, freeing up valuable administrator time which can then be used for handling complex cases, dealing with more vulnerable members and other initiatives to improve member service even further.”
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