Existence Checks and Deferred Member Tracing in Pensions
Existence Checks
Existence checks are essential for ensuring you know exactly where your members are and whether they are still living as stated, have relocated, or are deceased. These checks help keep your data up to date and protect against the risks of data decay. With LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, you can efficiently verify mortality and residency, helping make your entire member book more accurate and current
Improved data accuracy is critical for the life and pensions industry, supporting both regulatory compliance and effective member engagement.
Improving data accuracy and preventing overpayments
The Pensions Regulator continues to emphasise the importance of maintaining high-quality, reliable common data. Wrongful payments to deceased members cost pension schemes hundreds of millions annually. Our existence check solutions provide a proactive way to identify and resolve data issues, helping to maintain data integrity. These checks offer a modern alternative to the outdated and fraud-prone Certificate of Existence (COE) process.
Addressing data inaccuracy from life events
Common data within pension schemes can quickly become inaccurate and unreliable due to life events that are often not reported by members.
Each year in the UK:
11% of the population move home1
Over 500,000 people die2
Over 300,000 people emigrate3
Approximately 250,000
people get married3
Approximately 110,000 people get divorced3
These significant changes in circumstances frequently go unreported, further contributing to data inaccuracy.
Residency Checks
Ensuring members live where they claim to reside is vital for maintaining accurate records. Our solutions include residency verification tools to confirm addresses, reducing the risk of fraud and improving the reliability of your member data.
Whether it's tracing members domestically or abroad, we provide the expertise needed to help keep your records up to date.
Mortality Screening
Trustees and pension schemes are encouraged to perform regular mortality screenings to reduce the risk of fraud and stay informed of member deaths. More often than not, the scheme will be alerted to a death through screenings rather than by notification from the next of kin.
Our existence service is powered by data from the Disclosure of Death Registration Information (DDRI) feed, updated weekly by His Majesty’s Passport Office, providing the most up-to-date death registrations across the UK.
Additionally, our historic death data, dating back to 1976, offers exceptional insights to help you manage and validate member data.
Protection from impersonation of deceased fraud
Our existence check solution combines mortality screening with address verification, improving your confidence that an individual or member is not deceased and lives at the stated address. We offer batch cleanse facilities when you need to conduct existence checks on a large volume of individuals, as well as an ongoing monitoring service offering the highest level of protection with existence checks as often as you require.
Inevitably, lost or deferred members will need to be located with help from our deferred member tracing solutions.
Deferred, or Inactive, Member Tracing
Deferred member tracing is crucial in the ongoing management of pension schemes. Outdated tracing methods such as reactive certificate of existence or letter forwarding services are time-consuming, reliant on the member's response, and fail to provide the necessary data to help schemes stay connected.
Adapt to evolving circumstances in your pension member data
Our tracing solutions help schemes overcome the challenge of maintaining accurate data for inactive or lost members, and proving who members say they are. With The Pensions Regulator’s guidelines emphasising the importance of data integrity, poor data management can lead to additional costs and reputational damage.
Our services actively monitor data changes and offer solutions to trace deferred members, reconnecting them with their pension schemes in a timely manner.
Goneaways
One of the biggest challenges pension schemes face is the issue of ‘goneaways’ — members who have moved without updating their contact details. Focusing solely on known goneaways is not enough; schemes must take proactive steps to determine whether members are still alive or if they have relocated without informing the scheme.
Our solutions go beyond traditional tracing methods by using advanced tools to monitor and manage member data. Before assuming a member has simply "gone away," our existence checks help establish whether the member is deceased or alive, facilitating better next steps in locating them.
At LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, we offer a range of automated and manual existence checks, identity verification, and tracing services to help you maintain accurate and current member records:
Existence Check
To help reduce any data integrity problems, our existence check solutions deliver a proactive approach to reconcile issues within a database.
We offer batch cleanse facilities as well as ongoing monitoring as often as required.
Batch Trace
Specialist Trace
Inevitably certain members will be harder to locate and will require manual research. Our team of tracers have undergone extensive training for demanding and intricate pension tracing.
We aim to locate the whereabouts of lost members both in the UK and overseas and will only report positively if we are confident the correct individual has been traced.
Confirm Identity
Our leading solutions such as LexisNexis® Smartcleanse®, LexisNexis® TraceIQ®, LexisNexis® IDU®, and LexisNexis® Emailage® provide comprehensive tools to help safeguard your pension scheme data, trace members, comply with regulation, and prevent fraud.
Products you may be interested in
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Smartcleanse®
Online customer data cleansing, appending and enrichment solution
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TraceIQ®
Powerful trace and investigation software
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IDU®
Identity management platform for verifying and authenticating an individual’s identity.
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Emailage®
Email addresses and their risk should be a key part of your organisation’s identity management strategy. LexisNexis® Emailage® is a powerful email risk scoring solution.
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