Sharing Our Performance - March 2019
Our level of performance continues to be maintained as we strive to process first pension payments in a timely manner. As of 26 March, a total of 3852 applications have been processed, 97.49% of which were paid on time and of those 92.96% lump sum payments were paid by the members retirement date. Our customers should be seeing a much improved experience of our service now.
We are starting to see an increase in calls to our Contact Centre as we approach year end, so customers may experience a slightly longer wait time on all four pension lines (Member, Employer, TRS and Payroll) but this is fluctuating daily. We have put messages on the lines to further support customers at this time.
Revised Pensions (AW171)
All workstreams of the project are progressing well. A number of the following activities have moved on since the last update:
- Continuing to triage into specific work pots for similar types of casework
- Identified the administrators that will come together to create a ring fenced Revised Pensions Team. We have ensured there is no adverse impact on the other business areas in the creation of this team.
- Prepared a training plan for the resources
- Planned the first stage of the process to submit the forms through our internal Pensions Online system from mid-April.
- Planned for the further stages to process cases to completion from 6 May 2019, initially the volumes will be low but this will increase over time when the system development goes live.
Regular updates will be provided as part of our monthly performance summary so you can see what progress is being made.
2019 Year-end
To ensure your employee pension scheme member records are up to date and correct to the latest financial year, we need you to submit your 2019 year-end updates to March 2019 (for officer employments) between 1 April 2019 to 31 May 2019.
ESR Year-end updates 2019
ESR has notified us that the ESR year-end updates will be sent to us by 24 April 2019. This is slightly later than usual so as a result, our processing will commence later; however we are still expecting to complete processing by the end of May (this includes the processing of the April and May joiners and April leaver’s data files). Please check your records daily from the 26 April to see if your data has processed to enable you to commence cleansing at the earliest opportunity.
TRS Refresh 2019
This year’s TRS data cut for the annual refresh will take place after 7pm on Friday 21 June 2019, with refreshed statements being made available by the end of August 2019. The data cut for the mid year refresh will take place after 7pm on Friday 11 October 2019 with statements being made available early December 2019.
Greenbury 2018 and 2019
If you had individuals in last year’s (2017/2018) Greenbury exercise you may remember we had a number of issues. As part of the lessons learned exercise, we carried out a full review of the calculations and the processes and found a mistake was made in last year’s calculation. This was corrected ready for this year’s exercise (2018/2019) to enable a correct comparison with this year’s figures. The factors have been updated and the figures shown on the system this year are correct.
We put a number of improvements in place this year and hope that you have all had a better experience as the Greenbury exercise for 2018/2019 draws to a close.
Pensions Online (POL) downtime
POL is scheduled to be down during April between:
7pm Friday 26 April 2019 to 7am Monday 29 April 2019
If we do need to bring POL down at short notice for urgent maintenance, we will advise you as much as we can in advance via the POL homepage.