Are you regularly screening your customer base for mortality? Are you confident your current mortality screening processes are adequate to prevent pension fraud and avoid substantial fines and reputational damage for failing to keep customer information updated?
Mortality screening is the process of identifying deceased individuals within a contact database – an important component of customer data management. According to the Disclosure of Death Registration Information (DDRI), over half a million people pass away in the UK every year.
It’s estimated that 1 in 100 spouses, partners, close relations or friends fail to inform pension schemes when members die and that over 110,000 people in the UK could be claiming pensions right now, intentionally or otherwise, for relatives who are deceased.
The latest UK Government figures show that pension fraud is by far the most expensive category of fraud identified. Pension fraud and overpayments cost £144.8m in 2018, up 70% from 2016 and this figure is expected to increase exponentially with the ageing UK population and the recent introduction of auto-enrolment pensions.
With nearly 12 million pensioners in the UK, plus 7.5 million workplace pensions being paid, the scope for pension fraud is huge and is growing.
In the UK, GDPR regulation, introduced in 2018, has brought data quality to the fore for the Pensions industry. Data must be accurate and up to date, with every reasonable step taken to ensure that incorrect data is rectified without delay.
However, most pension schemes still rely on a very manual process for mortality checks. They write out to members once a year and require members to confirm they are still alive. In the event that they don’t respond, most pension schemes will send out at least one reminder. This process is costly, inefficient and is fully reliant on members’ prompt responses or else on timely death notifications from their relatives or close friends.
In fact, mailing deceased individuals is the single largest cause of complaints to the Information Commissioners Office. Receiving communications intended for a deceased loved one can be distressing for the recipient and can lead to reputational damage for the company involved.
Screening your database regularly for mortalities will help to protect brand reputation against contacting deceased individuals, avoid fraudulent overpayments, and help to ensure compliance with GDPR and Data Protection regulations, in turn protecting both the consumer and your business.
LexisNexis® Smartcleanse® enables you to screen your customer base for deceased individuals, as regularly as you need to.
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is part of a select number of companies licensed to receive DDRI data directly from the Identity and Passport Service. This data provides notice of all deaths registered within the UK, and is updated on a weekly basis, permitting data screening against the very latest mortality information available. Supplemented with our existing mortality datasets that includes historic death data spanning back to 1976, our deceased screening allows you to screen effectively for mortality, greatly reducing the risk of pension fraud and reputational damage.
With LexisNexis® Smartcleanse®, you can configure mortality checks to be carried out automatically, across your entire customer base, which may extend to millions of records, at a cadence that works for you:
We can offer mortality screening on an ad hoc basis, batch screening all your records against our comprehensive mortality data.
Continuous monitoring offers the highest level of fraud protection, data cleansing your records on a regular basis and as often as your require.
The system will generate automated alerts to let you know when a scheme member has died, so that these details can be updated immediately within your customer database, and appropriate actions can be taken to avoid overpayments.
“We are re-engaging with a higher percentage of our customers while reducing mailing costs and also reducing the risk of data protection breaches”
