Surrey Pension Fund

Surrey Pension Fund is valued at £6 billion, and serves 133,000 members across 500 employers. The fund pays 34,000 pensioners each month and previously operated as a multi-administration set-up.

In the last four years, they moved to a single fund and have been in a period of transformation with a clear vision: to provide their members with a better tomorrow.

Surrey and Heywood’s 20-year partnership and shared values are working together to provide meaningful change through digital services.

The project

Surrey knew the project had an ambitious timeline, and the go-live plan identified pain points, configured and built a new workflow, included customisations, testing, staff training and member communications, including member video tutorials.

The collaboration between Surrey’s project team and the Heywood project manager was strong throughout, helping to ensure the project ran smoothly and successfully met its launch date.

One of the key aims of the project was to fully train and engage Surrey’s Customer Relationship Team in system configuration, providing them with the support and tools to develop other processes on the platform.

The pre-built templates required little to no configuration, saving time and providing a strong structure for member journeys.

Heywood’s team also configured the forms to align with Surrey processes, reducing complexity and ensuring they flowed well and worked for members.

The journey

The impact of Online Processing has been significant.

Before Heywood Engage, the manual retirement process could take up to 30 days, assuming everything ran smoothly.

In some cases, and particularly when facing postage delays, this could mean adding days or even weeks to the completion time.

Surrey found that the Pensions Rights Declaration was a particular sticking point. The document was uploaded as a PDF, where the member would need to download a copy, handwrite their response, scan the paper and send it back. The process was easily interrupted or prone to failure.

The benefits

Post-implementation, the average retirement takes just twelve days from request to payment, saving the equivalent of £80,000 of Surrey Pension Teams’ time.

This has resulted in the Fund reallocating administrative work to address more complex cases, such as McCloud rectification, without requiring additional resources.

From a member’s point of view, things are much simpler. They can access a clean interface on desktop, mobile, or tablet and download all submitted materials into a single PDF, providing a complete record without contacting the fund for copies.

For Surrey Pension Fund, streamlining and moving more processes online, such as contribution forms and refunds, means Surrey can provide consistent member support and handle large volumes of work.

The Surrey Pension Fund Experience

“The big win that we’ve seen is that we are now finding that as many as 75% of our retirements are being initiated online in a quarter, and we’ve had significant reductions in the time it takes to process those cases.

So, ultimately, the quicker that we can do that work, and the more accurately we can do that work, our customers who are taking their benefit at a really important time can start to feel the benefits of that in their personal lives.

When a member initiates it themselves online, that’s looking more like one to two days. So the time savings, both for us in terms of operations, but most importantly the speed at which the member is now able to get that quote, which will effectively turn into a payment in due course, is significant.”

- Head of Pensions - Customer Operations

“The form builder itself is very straightforward, easy to understand and intuitive. Meaning the team can create and customise forms confidently and without a steep learning curve. We can respond to feedback quickly. It’s a very adaptable, flexible system.

Moving online hasn’t just improved efficiency, it’s removed an entire layer of uncertainty from the process. Previously, members would start the retirement process and not continue and it wasn’t clear if you would like their pension or not, so there was a lot of writing back and forth. It’s now much clearer and members have an insight into where things are in the process.

If they provide inconsistent or inaccurate information, we can ask them to resubmit information within Engage, rather than getting in touch separately.

Online retirements was an area where we used to receive a lot of queries. It’s now our best performing process with a miniscule number of calls. We’re now able to focus our attention on complex cases like McCloud rectification, without having to take on additional resource.”

Pensions Senior Manager - Service Delivery

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Heywood’s Engage is designed specifically for user-friendly member journeys, freeing up time for pension providers to focus on what they
do best - delivering exceptional customer experiences.

The Engage Online Processing functionality empowers schemes to create and distribute secure custom forms to members. The completed forms are returned digitally, replacing traditional, paper-based processes.

Retirement, reimagined: Surrey Pension Fund's £80k efficiency gain