Annuities: a better journey for advisers and customers, more premium kept and healthier A/E

UK individual annuities are a large and growing market. ABI figures for 2025 show £7.4 billion of premium across 87,600 annuities, with an average purchase of about £84,000. Most of that premium is decided one case at a time, by an adviser or a customer working through a pile of paperwork.

That paperwork is where providers win or lose. A slow quote loses an intermediary's case to a faster panel member. A health answer that is never captured turns an enhanced case into a standard one, and the customer takes their fund elsewhere. A health answer captured wrongly shows up years later in your mortality experience.

This post sets out how we work with annuity providers to fix all three at once. Your basis stays yours. We remove the rekeying between a client's documents and your price, and we record exactly what each price was built on.

Where premium is won and lost

Three moments decide most cases.

The first quote. Advisers compare providers side by side. The provider that returns an accurate enhanced quote first, with the options laid out, starts ahead. A quote that needs a callback or a resubmitted form often never gets a second look.

The requote. Quotes are guaranteed for a set period. Health updates, fund value changes and option changes all mean a new quote. Every requote is another chance to lose the case if it takes days rather than minutes.

Retirement for your own pension customers. When your existing customers reach retirement, you already hold their pension details. If the journey to an annuity is harder with you than with a competitor, some of that premium leaves. It is premium you have already won once.

The journey we build with you

The journey is the same whether an intermediary or your own customer starts it. What changes is where the data comes from.

1. Case setup. The user signs in and consents to the use of health data. They then choose single or joint life, survivor's income, escalation, guarantee and payment frequency. No document holds these, so they are asked for once, up front.
2. Drop the pack. Application form, health questionnaire, repeat prescription, pension statements and fund valuations go in together, as PDFs, scans, photos or spreadsheets. Each document is classified and its fields extracted.
3. Review with provenance. Every extracted value shows the document and page it came from. The adviser or customer checks the values instead of typing them. Fields that move the price are marked, so they are checked first.
4. Checks before price. The case runs the same checks every time. Medicines are matched to declared conditions, dates of birth compared across documents, fund values matched to statements, and eligibility rules applied. Anything that fails goes to an underwriter rather than pricing silently.
5. Price on your basis. Standard and enhanced income are shown side by side, with level and escalating options and guarantees. The price comes from your basis, running deterministically in Ptally.
6. Bind. The priced data is hashed and travels with the application pack to your own e-signature provider. If anything changes after quoting, it is a new quote.

What changes for intermediaries

Advisers spend much of an annuity case moving data from one document to another. Taking that away is the clearest benefit we can offer them.

• No rekeying. The client pack goes in once. The adviser checks values against their source page instead of typing them.
• Options in one view. Level against RPI, with and without a guarantee, single against joint. Each one is priced by the same basis and stored.
• Fewer surprises at completion. Conflicts are raised when the case is quoted, not weeks later when the application is processed.
• An explanation on request. The adviser can ask the AI client why the price is what it is. It answers from the stored checks and price. It explains; it does not recommend.

What changes for your own pension customers

Your existing customers need fewer documents, because you already hold their pension records.

• Pre-filled from your records. Fund values and policy details come straight from your systems. The customer uploads health evidence only.
• Guidance in the journey. Prompts to take guidance sit in the journey itself. So do prompts to consider whether health or lifestyle could mean a higher income. Each prompt and response is recorded with the case.
• The same price an adviser would see. Direct and intermediated cases reach the same engine and the same basis version. That consistency is easy to show, because both are recorded the same way.

A customer whose health is captured properly is more likely to see an enhanced quote from you. That is the strongest reason for them to stay rather than shop around.

Protecting A/E by underwriting class

Your pricing team watches actual against expected mortality, usually by lives and by amounts, and by underwriting class. When people live longer than priced, A/E falls below 100% and the book loses money.

Misdisclosure is one of the quieter causes. If enhancements are paid to people who were less unwell than declared, it appears years later as weak experience in the enhanced classes. By then the business is on the books.

The checks in the journey are designed to catch this before the price is issued:

• Medicines against conditions. A prescription with no matching declared condition is flagged for an underwriter.
• Dates against dates. Diagnosis dates, prescription dates and dates of birth are compared across documents.
• Evidence at completion. Where a GP report is requested, it can be compared with the original questionnaire, and the case requoted if needed.

Every check is stored with the quote, along with the evidence behind it. That gives your team a clean record of what each underwriting class was priced on. When you analyse experience later, you can see which evidence supported each enhancement.

We do not set your mortality assumptions or your loadings. Your actuaries own the basis and approve every version. Ptally runs it, checks the data going into it and records the result.

What you keep control of

Annuity providers are rightly careful about health data and model risk. The deployment reflects that.

• Your cloud. Ptally runs in your own cloud account or data centre. We ship releases; we hold no customer data and need no standing access.
• Your basis. New versions are drafted, tested against your test pack and published only by your pricing team.
• Your AI and document models. The AI client can use Claude with zero data retention, or a model you choose. The document reader runs where you decide.
• Separate roles. Advisers and customers can quote. Only the pricing team can change the model.

How a pilot works

The fastest way to judge this is to see your own basis running on a synthetic case.

1. Send a rate table or a sample basis. We build it in Ptally, with tests your team agrees.
2. Run synthetic cases end to end. Clean typed forms, messy scans, a medicine with no declared condition and a joint life case.
3. Agree a baseline before going live. Useful measures include quote turnaround, requote volume and referral rate. Add how often extracted values are overridden, and the not taken up rate.

Those measures give you a fair before and after, on your own cases, before any wider rollout.

See the journey, the checks and the deployment on our annuity pricing page, or talk to our team about a pilot.