PRT Growth Exposes the Limits of Legacy Systems

October 5, 2026 / 3 min read

With pension plans becoming better funded amid favorable market conditions, life and annuity insurers operating in the pension risk transfer (PRT) market have a significant opportunity to help plan sponsors reduce long-term pension liabilities and transfer risk to insurers. As funding levels improve, more sponsors may find it an opportune time to de-risk their plans through PRT transactions. But do carriers have the digital infrastructure to keep pace with a fast-moving market and confidently assure plan sponsors that they will fulfill their promise to retirees?

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The PRT market continues to grow, creating significant opportunities for insurers. PRT transactions increased an average of 20% annually from 2012 through 2024, a record-breaking year that saw 785 deals totaling $51.8 billion, according to Aon’s PRT Insurer Sales Survey as reported in the firm’s U.S. Pension Risk Transfer Update. The market’s continued growth is further reflected in the 2025 Mercer/Argyle CFO Survey, where 64% of respondents said they had completed or were considering PRT transactions with insurers for some of their plan liabilities.

The trouble with PRT workflows

A rising volume of increasingly complex transactions creates new operational challenges for insurers relying on legacy systems and manual processes. These systems are often difficult to upgrade or scale, and manual workflows can hinder speed and efficiency. The result: limited ability to respond quickly to market opportunities and high demand on IT resources for maintenance and, if an opportunity is won, preparing systems to onboard the new business.

Legacy approaches to bidding on PRT business and executing won contracts can be painfully slow and resource-intensive. A large, long-established sponsor may have plans dating back 70 years. Whatever the time span, every permutation of the pension benefits, including benefit options, the sponsor offered over the years must be onboarded to the buyer’s environment, along with the details of each beneficiary, many of which are likely to be out of date.Once the data is in-house, the next step is determining how to convert all of these accounts into annuities that will pay beneficiaries a reliable income consistent with the original plan’s terms and options. This work needs to maintain whatever joint or survivorship provisions the sponsor stipulated, and there can be many variations within and across pension plans.

Finally, the PRT buyer essentially needs to run a bulletproof payroll system, ensuring all withholdings are correct and payments reach beneficiaries’ bank accounts on time, every time.

Leaving legacy systems behind

Ingesting, cleansing, and updating the data, mapping the promised benefits to annuity contracts, and preparing the policy administration system for long-term execution can take months using a legacy platform. This may, in fact, consist of multiple platforms cobbled together by manual interventions and workarounds. A months-long process may limit an insurer’s capacity to bid on new business coming to market. Across the organization, there simply isn’t the bandwidth to take on a new bid before the preceding piece of business is fully onboarded.

The good news is, absorbing PRT blocks doesn’t have to be this way. It’s possible to consolidate previously siloed functions onto one platform and digitize manual processes, using AI to streamline repetitive work, analyze benefit structures, and even build a library of transferable knowledge to support future transactions. And it can reduce the time from bid to completed onboarding to just weeks, opening the door to future deals sooner.

Watch for the next article in this series to take a deeper dive into what’s holding the PRT industry back, and how it can move forward.

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The trouble with PRT workflows

Leaving legacy systems behind