Isio announces new service successfully providing endgame analysis for DB Schemes

28 July 2025: Isio has announced a new service accessible to trustees and sponsors of DB pension schemes to choose the right strategy. The service is a response to schemes needing to proactively consider all endgame options, and the new reality that for some well-funded schemes buy-out at the earliest opportunity will not be the best approach. Developed over the last two years with clients, Isio have launched an efficient new service which provides a greater level of insight to quantitatively assess the range of options.

Many DB schemes have historically grappled with overwhelming deficits and have seen buy-out as their only option when they were able to afford it. Now, better funded schemes have a wider range of options available to them, including Purposeful Run On (PRO), but traditional deterministic modelling approaches lack the sophistication required to make an informed decision.

Isio’s new service adapts methods typically only available to larger schemes and refines it to be able to make it available at an accessible cost for most schemes. The approach applies stochastic modelling techniques to evaluate target outcomes in a more sophisticated way than traditional deterministic modelling techniques.

Isio’s service has already been used successfully by over 20 clients ranging in size from assets of just £50m to several £bn. It has been used to assess PRO against buy-out at the earliest opportunity, set guard rails for surplus release frameworks, decide when it makes sense for sponsors to meet a gap to fund insurance and assess investment decisions such as target returns and scope for partial buy-ins.

Matt Brown, Director at Isio, comments:“Whether to run on purposefully or buy-out at the earliest opportunity is the single biggest decision in a DB scheme’s journey. If you think of these as the bookends, there’s a wide range of options in between.

The risk-reward trade-offs are nuanced and the traditional approach of drawing a few deterministic projections on a page doesn’t cut the mustard. The tools that we’ve developed give our clients better insight to make informed decisions. We expect this type of analysis will become the gold standard for schemes considering their options under the new regime.”