Heywood
2025 marks Heywood’s 50th year in business. Over the past five decades, the company and the pensions industry have evolved tremendously. We are proud to have played a pivotal role in shaping some of the sector’s most important developments.
To celebrate this incredible journey, we are sharing stories that reflect on our heritage, long-standing relationships and the impact we’ve made. This article covers the inception and journey of our organisation over the years.
At the time, scheme valuations took place every five years. Pension teams completed paper service record cards and the data was shared with actuaries in large Kalamazoo binders. Completing the service records would take two years and it took a long time for the actuary to review each card and provide the valuation results.
Geoffrey Heywood thought of a different way – using electronic systems to store the information and send it via magnetic tape storage, to speed up the process. This led to the thought, “If we’re holding all of that information in the system, why can’t we use it for calculations as well?”.
A better way
He approached local government pension funds, promising a better way. Heywood and Partners was born in a meeting room at the Trust House Forte (now Britannia) Airport Hotel in Manchester.
All eleven founding members agreed to pay Heywood to build this exciting new electronic product, the ‘Computerised Local Authority Superannuation System’, known as ‘CLASS’. This first meeting was the inception of Heywood and the ‘CLASS Group’ as it is known today.
The CLASS system began as a mainframe system that documented ‘G20’ new starter data input forms and ‘G50’ retirement forms. It was a batch-driven system with no user interface. Pension administrators would fill in the form and take it to the ‘punch’ team by noon each day, for the forms to create punch cards. The punch cards were then submitted to the computer in batches to be executed and produce output.
The system would use the information to set up records, calculate pensions and provide an output of results the next morning. Building on the success of CLASS, in 1976, Heywood and Partners developed ‘Passman’, specifically for private sector pension schemes.
CLASSIC interfaces
In the early 1980s, personal computers were introduced to the workplace. Heywood capitalised on the opportunity by developing ‘CLASSIC’ – adding ‘Interactive Computing’ to the acronym. Pension teams could log into their computers to view and input data into a user interface, which would be uploaded to the mainframe overnight.
While the CLASS system had been very successful, it was still a mainframe system, which required a lot of IT maintenance. In 1982, Heywood developed ‘CPX’, a standalone turnkey pensions admin system with a graphical user interface.
CPX rapidly grew in popularity and was the basis for the next iteration of Heywood’s admin software, AXIS.
In the 1990s, Heywood took another technological leap and migrated all CLASS Group members from the mainframe to the AXIS and then the AXISe system (an email-enabled iteration), which used a menu-driven interface rather than a green screen. AXISe ran until the early 2000s and was succeeded by Altair, the market-leading admin system that pension schemes enjoy today.
The CLASS Group continues to serve as an excellent means of uniquely strong and active collaboration between Heywood and their customers, influencing product development and sharing experiences.
Produced with thanks to the contributions of Colin Lewis, who celebrated 37 years of Heywood service on his retirement in 2024.
