The rate of defined benefit pension liabilities transferring to the insurance market is set to double, according to PwC.
The consultancy claims that its new valuations and analytics platform will help more potential deals complete by making it quicker and less expensive for pension scheme trustees and companies to de-risk.
Most of the insurers operating in the buyout market have agreed to use the Skyval Insure pensions valuations and analytics platform to provide initial prices for the cost of insuring defined benefit pension obligations, PwC says.
The new technology means that pricing for potential buyout/buy-in deals takes days rather than weeks.
This means more buyout requests are likely to convert into deals, as pension scheme trustees and companies will have better pricing visibility, PwC predicts. Insurers will also be able to focus resources on deals that are more likely to proceed.
Jerome Melcer, pensions buyout adviser at PwC and head of Skyval development, said that many viable deals never get to market as they are based overly prudent estimates of the buyout cost.
'In deals we have completed recently, we have struck pricing terms significantly lower than the cost trustees or sponsors were expecting from other sources,' he said.
Raj Mody, head of PwC pensions consulting team and Skyval, said that many trustees and sponsors of DB pension schemes wanted to create more certainty for pension members by transferring obligations to the insurance market, but that the process was often too expensive, slow and uncertain.
'Pricing visibility means that companies can allocate capital to de-risk with confidence, trustees can have much more clarity and control in that process, and members end up with a good outcome,' said Mody.
PwC says that the £50bn of DB pension liabilities insured by pension schemes since 2006, is only a fraction of the near £2 trillion worth of liabilities still on UK balance sheets.