Employer update 02 2019

February 2019

Meet the team: Active retirements

For information

This month we met Active Retirements Team Manager, Andy Wainwright, to talk about the work of his busy team, what they do now and what they’ve got coming up.

What team do you run?

I run the Active Retirement Team, we provide retirement quotations and settle benefits for members retiring from active employment. We have a different team to look after deferred members who are retiring.

Can you tell us what you like about working at USS?

I will have been at USS for 20 years in September and have always found the people and working environment to be excellent.

Tell us about the role of the Retirements team, what do they do?

The team is split between quotations and retirements.

The quotation section of the team deal with the provision of quotations to all active members who are considering retirement or have agreed a date of retirement with their employer. We aim to provide the information within three working days for full retirement and five working days for flexible retirement quotations. On average we receive around 50 new requests every day. They can vary complexity from one case to another.

The retirement section deal with the settlement of retirement benefits. Our aim is to settle all the benefits by the member’s date of retirement. During each year some months are always busier than others, however, the team work brilliantly to ensure everything is completed in a timely manner.

Who is on your team?

I have 15 people on the team. Elaine Pierrepont and Leah Robinson are the Assistant Team Managers. Elaine manages the quotations section of the team and Leah manages the retirement settlement section.

It’s a big and busy team made up of technical experts, and senior and pensions administrators (see below). A lot of us have been with USS for a long time so as you can appreciate there is a vast wealth of experience and knowledge on the team.

What's a typical day like for you and your team?

A typical day starts with reviewing the work, which is due for completion that day and assessing the resource we have available on the team. This may require some movement of people between quotations and retirements to ensure the work we have due that day is completed within the service level agreement.

The rest of the day is spent on casework, reviewing the forecasted volumes of work, trends or attending meetings.

To put it into context: in 2018 we processed 11,676 quotation requests and settled 3,828 benefits.

The busier months of the year tend to be July, August, September and December and during these months we can process anything from double to five times as many retirements as in steadier months.

Despite that, during last year the turnaround times reduced significantly and we introduced more content to the letters following feedback from employers and members.

The team have done, and continue to do, a fantastic job and hopefully our employers and members think so too.

What’s happening in the retirement space in 2019?

We are always looking to improve the retirement quotation and settlement process in conjunction with members and employers, based on the feedback we receive. Last year we improved the turnaround times, letters and member section of the retirement form.

One of the continuous improvements in the pipeline is the revision of the employer sections of the provisional retirement request and retirement notification forms. The review aims to make sure that the information we need from employers is included and so reduce the likelihood of having to ask follow-up questions. That should enable us to provide information to the employer and member more efficiently.

We work in partnership with employers, do you have any special requests of our clients to make our processes work even more smoothly?!

If you are aware of any exercises that could cause a significant increase in the number of retirement quote requests from your members (eg redundancy or voluntary severance), please let us know as soon as you are able to so we can assess any potential impact. By providing us with this information we can ensure that we have sufficient resource available to provide the requested information within SLA.

To help us process retirements on time we need to have completed retirement forms a month before the date of retirement. This means we can resolve any queries in plenty of time.

If our clients have any particular queries, who should they contact?

You can contact Elaine Pierrepont (for quotations), Leah Robinson (for retirement settlements) or myself in the first instance.

If your query is not urgent then email retirementteam@uss.co.uk or contact a member of the team on 0151 556 0623.

And finally! The Quick Fire Favourite Five! Share with us your favourite:

Film: City of God

Musician: Roy Orbison

Drink: Latte

Food: Chinese

Holiday destination: Florida