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Blog The Bulk Annuity Buyout Blockage: Why Winning the Business Is the Easy Part
Recently I spent some time with the team from a brand-new insurer, walking them through how Mantle could support them for initial pricing through to buyout and administration. And about ten minutes in, it struck me: pricing a scheme has never really been the bottleneck in this market. It just looks that way from the outside.
A few years ago, if you were a trustee trying to get a defined benefit scheme off to an insurer, you had maybe five insurers to choose from, and they could afford to be picky. Data not quite tidy enough? Come back when it is. Scheme a bit too complicated? Next.
That world is gone. Established names like Royal London moved into the bulk purchase annuity market a few years back. Newer entrants, Utmost among them, followed within the last year or so. Between better-funded schemes and a steady stream of new insurers, there is now genuine supply to meet the demand. Getting a price, even a good one, is no longer the hard part.
The market grew up. The systems didn’t.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The problem has moved. It often used to sit at the front of the process, getting a scheme ready to be priced. Now it sits much further down the line, in what happens after an insurer wins the business.
Pricing a scheme is one job. Getting efficiently from buy-in to buyout and full administration is quite another. Paying members, handling deaths, transfers, retirements, for decades to come, is a long term job.
In a lot of insurers, different elements of the process are handled by different systems, built at different times, that were never designed to talk to each other. Data gets exported from one, reformatted, and loaded into the next. This introduces risk, adds cost and slows the journey to buyout.
We know of many Insurers keen to review their systems and processes. It’s a bit like trying to refit a ship while it’s still crossing the Channel. Everyone knows the engine needs work. Nobody can bring it into port, because the bookings keep coming in.
And trustees are starting to notice. Price was always the headline, but it’s no longer the whole story. We’ve all heard versions of the same story: an insurer prices well, wins the business, and then the transaction from buy-in to full buyout drags on for years, leaving trustees and members waiting far longer than anyone was told to expect. That kind of delay doesn’t just cost time. It costs reputation, for the insurer and, by association, for the trustees who chose them.
Nine months isn’t a typo
So what does good actually look like? Utmost’s transaction with the Noble Foods Limited Pension Scheme is a fair example. Utmost completed the buy-in in April 2025. By the following spring, they’d issued all 455 individual buyout policies to scheme members and dependants, taking the scheme from buy-in to full buyout in under a year.
For context, that journey often takes closer to two years in this market. Utmost got there in a fraction of the time, running the entire process, pricing, valuation, reporting and administration, on one platform rather than stitching several together.
One system, start to finish
That’s really the whole idea behind Mantle. Pricing, buy-in, true-up, and full administration: one system, one dataset, no rekeying.
Complex benefit calculations handled
These can be difficult to price and administer. Mantle uses a different approach to calculation configuration. No “black box” coding of calculations. Just choose from the calculation library. Ones we haven’t seen before can be quickly configured and added. Take unequalised GMP for example. Some Insurers pass but Mantle natively supports dual opposite sex records.
The new battleground
New entrants have an advantage here that established insurers envy: a clean sheet of paper. There’s no legacy system to work around, no twenty-year-old platform to slowly unpick while the business keeps growing regardless. They can just start with something that works.
Price got insurers to the table. Increasingly, it’s execution, and the member experience that comes with it, that decides who actually gets chosen. Trustees have a duty to act in members’ best interests, and that duty doesn’t stop at signature.
That’s the buyout blockage: the growing gap between how quickly a scheme can be priced and how long it actually takes to complete. Closing it isn’t about working harder. It’s about not asking multiple disconnected systems to do a job that one system should do.
If you’d like to talk about closing the gap between buy-in and buyout, get in touch with the team at Mantle. Start a conversation today.
