Punter Southall launches longevity assumptions service

The consultant said the move followed The Pensions Regulator proposals that trustees must make a prudent assumption regarding future mortality improvements.

The Board for Actuarial Standards has also emphasised the need to appreciate the level of uncertainty.

Punter Southall said the tool – ProLonG – would take trustees through the various types of projections that were available and provided a step-by-step approach to the key elements in choosing a fully defined set of projections for the future.

In addition, it said it would also provides scheme specific modelling to help trustees form a view of the plausibility of their proposed assumption; illustrations of the range of uncertainty in the assessment of the scheme’s liabilities; and benchmarking of the proposed assumption relative to those chosen by others.

Punter Southall principal Joanne Livingstone said: "ProLonG will help trustees choose a prudent yet plausible assumption for future improvements by giving them evidence for the different types of projections, knowledge as to the potential liability impact of each projection, and benchmarking against other schemes."

This move comes a month after Hymans Robertson launched a service to provide schemes with data on how postcodes and income levels affect mortality assumptions (Professional Pensions Online, June 10).

The consultant said its subsidiary firm, Club Vita, had been developing a database of records for the past 18 months in order to provide schemes better calculate longevity.

It said it already had two million members of local authority pension schemes involved in a pilot scheme – covering around 250,000 death records over a 15 year period.

It said the pilot scheme would accept new schemes until July 31.