About the client
Our client is a leading UK consultancy specialising in pensions, investment, employee benefits and wealth consultancy. They are responsible for advising some of the UK's largest pension schemes and are powered by a £300 billion track record of assets under advice.
Key outcomes
We built a bespoke web portal to streamline pension scheme oversight for trustees, resulting in:
Stronger adoption and engagement
Used daily by 150+ trustees and 70% of the risk settlement team across 200+ active pension schemes.
Significant time savings
Trustees reported a 60–70% reduction in time spent on scheme oversight and reporting tasks.
Improved decision-making
Real-time access to scheme data replaced static Word-based reports, enabling faster, data-driven insights.
Business challenge
Static, one-off reports limiting trustee oversight and decision-making
Pension scheme trustees and sponsors had traditionally relied on static Word documents to review insurance readiness checklists. While these reports were detailed and standardised, they were delivered as one-off documents. This made it difficult to keep information current, track ongoing progress, or foster effective collaboration as schemes moved toward buyout.
Key challenges
- Point-in-time reporting: Assessments could not be updated or used to monitor ongoing progress.
- Limited collaboration: Static documents made it hard to facilitate meaningful discussions between trustees and consultants.
- Fragmented oversight: Preparation, insurer engagement, finalisation, and financial tracking were handled separately, limiting transparency.
- Scaling issues: Trustees managing multiple schemes lacked a consolidated, real-time view across all their responsibilities.
Recognising these barriers, our client envisioned a dynamic, web-based portal that would transform readiness checklists into an interactive, continuous process.
By structuring the platform around configurable modules for preparation, insurer engagement, finalisation, and balance sheet tracking, trustees would gain real-time visibility, transparency, and control, turning static reporting into a collaborative journey toward buyout.
To bring this vision to life, our client brought us in to design and develop the bespoke solution.
Project Goals
The project entailed the following requirements:
- Create a bespoke web portal for trustees to manage and oversee pension schemes.
- Design and deploy four distinct modules: preparation, quote & transaction, finalisation, and balance sheet, that function as part of an integrated process.
- Provide live tracking of tasks and issue resolution to ensure timely progression toward entering the insurance market.
- Ensure the platform allows admins to configure, update, and maintain scheme data with flexibility in editing tasks, statuses, and financial data.
- Develop comprehensive reporting and auditing tools to facilitate detailed extraction of scheme data, user actions, and status changes.
- Implement robust user management features, including multi-factor authentication (MFA) and detailed user roles to control access to sensitive information.
The solution
Platform functionality
The system is designed as a modular platform with distinct yet connected components. Each part addresses a specific user need, ensuring both trustees and internal teams can work collaboratively.
Web portal
A secure, user-friendly interface where trustees can access and manage the schemes assigned to them. Trustees gain a consolidated view across all their schemes and can drill down into detailed module-level information, improving oversight and decision-making.
Admin portal
A dedicated portal for administrators to create, configure, and publish schemes. This component enables internal users to manage scheme allocations, assign consultants, and ensure records are kept up to date, providing the flexibility needed to adapt the platform to different trustee requirements.
Reporting
The platform includes built-in reporting tools for audit and informational purposes. Internal users can input a date range and generate different types of reports, such as user activity, schemes added, scheme status, and insurer status.
PDF snapshot
Both internal users and trustees can generate snapshots of schemes at any time. Snapshots can be exported as full reports or filtered by selected modules/sections within a scheme, with multi-select enabled for flexibility.
The impact
- The platform is now used by 150+ trustees and professional trustees, giving them real-time access to scheme data.
- Over 200+ pension schemes have been configured and actively tracked through the portal, replacing static Word-based reports.
- Internal adoption has been strong, with 70% of the Risk Settlement team and all administrators using the system daily.
- Trustees report saving 60–70% of their time on scheme oversight and reporting compared to the old manual process.
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