The Rolls-Royce UK Pension Fund last year completed a benchmark deal for member-first de-risking, influencing how schemes approach and focus on the member experience.

The fund completed a £4.3bn full buy-in with Pension Insurance Corporation in August 2025 making it the largest scheme to ever reach full insurance, with a buy-out scheduled for mid-2026.

The fund needed to buy-out a large, complex pension scheme while maintaining a world-class experience for its 36,000 members. Key elements of the member experience were highly advanced, including in online functionality.

The trustee's risk transfer advisers, LCP, worked within these principles, designing a bespoke process to maximise insurer engagement and innovation to meet the trustee objectives.

The trustee also adopted a member-focused approach, including through workshops to analyse and understand member impact. This approach was individualised so that any impacts or "cliff edge" cases could be identified for the development of bespoke solutions.

Member options terms, such as bridging pension options, or fixed early retirement terms, were insured in full to replicate the benefits that members were entitled to, resulting in no disruption to key member service elements, including the self-service portal.