A Unitek Case Study

How We Partnered with Legal & General to Help UK Retirees Tap £20b in Unclaimed Pensions

Have you changed several employers or worked abroad? If so, chances are you don’t know for sure what pensions you have with your old employers.

It’s not just you. Many people are in the same boat. The numbers are staggering: Recent reports indicate almost £20/€23 billion in unclaimed pensions from some 1.6 million pension pots in the UK.

And even if you do know how much you’re entitled to, claiming those pensions is a complicated, drawn-out, manual, and fragmented process. You typically need to contact the HR or finance departments of your previous employers and complete tonnes of paperwork to get the pension across to your current employer’s provider.

About Legal & General

This is where our partners from Legal & General (L&G), a FTSE 100 company and the UK’s largest provider of individual life assurance products, come in. In late 2020, the company launched two new services:

• Tracing service: Helping customers track down lost or forgotten pension pots. The service is unique in the market in offering a no-strings-attached solution, meaning there is no obligation to buy a product once the tracing is complete.
• Consolidation service: For customers who want to bring their various pension savings together.

The Challenge: Streamlining a Uniquely Document-Heavy Process

While customers working with L&G reported much higher success rates than people who opted to hunt for lost pension pots on their own, L&G’s services could be automated and optimised further.

Managing fragmented and scattered documentation meant experiencing significant bottlenecks in document processing.

On a daily basis, L&G’s team handled a huge volume of documentation from 60+ pension providers. Eight of which contributed a whopping 70% of total processing.

While the content itself was relatively similar across providers, document types and reporting methods varied widely. Most documents didn’t follow a templated structure, some remained unstructured, and many were paper-based.

The lack of consistency meant dedicated L&G personnel had to manually input a colossal amount of data into their internal system. This disrupted the workflow and ate up resources and labour hours that could have been used for higher-impact work such as attracting more customers or enhancing customer service.

Unitek’s Solutions: Process Automation & Intelligent Data Extraction

L&G turned to Unitek to help eliminate this bottleneck.

We started with the eight largest pension providers that took up the bulk of L&G’s processing efforts. First, we digitised and uploaded the many and various documents types. Then, we standardised them to make them automation capable and employed our smart data extraction solutions to extract huge volumes of valuable data in minutes — all without error or manual intervention.

Next, we turned our focus to equipping L&G with the tools and understanding to proceed on their own and automate the remaining document processing tasks without having to hire expensive in-house developers or third-party consultants.

We created a comprehensive and customisable dashboard to enable L&G to easily find the information they need. The intuitive interface also allows them to automate any process using the built-in drag-and-drop automation builder without writing a single line of code.

The Result: Radically Streamlined Operations and Happier Customers

As a result of implementing Unitek’s Automaton Experience Platform, L&G is now able to:

• Process huge amounts of documentation in various formats — including handwritten, machine-typed, scanned, poorly structured, or unstructured documents — from 60+ pension providers in minutes.
• Automatically extract and input customer data with above-human accuracy of >99%.
• Easily set up custom automations to fit the company’s evolving needs without writing a line of code.
• Drastically accelerate application processing time from days and weeks to minutes, allowing L&G to service more customers and push more applications through the system.
• Optimise the pension pot tracing service to become less manual and more error-free.
• Free up time, money, and human capital to focus on core business activities such as improving customer service and revenue generation.

Talking about the partnership, Unitek CEO Martin Brown said:

Curious If Unitek Could Help Your Business Too?

Our automation solutions are extremely versatile.

They can help businesses from industries as diverse as banking, fintech, mortgages, insurance, operational excellence, and more to make manual paper processing a thing of the past, radically streamline daily operations, cut back on costs, and enhance customer experience.

To see for yourself what our Automation Experience Platform can do for you and your business, book a free, no-strings-attached demo today.