XPS Group launches XPS Catalyst, to accelerate buyouts for sub-£15m DB pension schemes

XPS Group launches XPS Catalyst, to accelerate buyouts for sub-£15m DB pension schemes

03 Dec 2025

XPS Group, a leading UK consulting and administration business specialising in the pensions and insurance sectors, has launched XPS Catalyst, an end-to-end solution to help defined benefit pension schemes with under £15m in assets achieve insurance buyout at pace. The platform ensures that small DB schemes which would otherwise face barriers to market, can access viable endgame solutions and secure member benefits quickly.

Around 1,850 of the UK’s ~5,000 DB schemes hold less than £10m in assets. Nearly half of these are already fully funded on a buyout basis, yet over 600 remain financially ready but still uninsured.* While a small proportion have managed to transact in the past year, XPS estimates there are still hundreds of smaller pension schemes that would like to secure buyout but are struggling to access the market.

Catalyst tackles the main barriers to buyout including data preparation / cleansing, drafting benefit specification and GMP equalisation. By harnessing expertise from across XPS’s insurance, risk settlement, actuarial, investment and administration teams, schemes can be onboarded in as little as five weeks and can secure an insurance transaction in as little as three months, rather than years.

Steve Morris, Partner at XPS Group, commented: “Really small pension schemes have been neglected for too long. Trustees tell us that their schemes are fully funded and want to buyout, but they struggle to get the support needed to attract insurer attention.  This makes getting to buyout trickier and more expensive than it needs to be, and in some cases, impossible.  XPS Catalyst has been specially designed to resolve this by putting the right people and processes in place to get schemes out to market quickly.”

*Source: PPF’s The Purple Book 2024