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In development. Now taking design partners.

Find out what actually happened to your gone-away members.

PHX, PensionHunter Investigator, is the member investigation platform we are building for pension schemes and administrators. It gathers evidence from multiple sources, reasons across it, and produces an explainable Member Investigation Report with recommended next actions. Every conclusion carries the evidence behind it.

The problem, as a scheme experiences it

A scheme has a list of members it cannot reach. Existing tracing returns a probabilistic match against a database. The scheme cannot tell how confident to be, cannot see what was checked, and cannot show a trustee board why it acted. When the match is wrong, the scheme carries the consequence.

What makes PHX different

Two independent sources, or it stays a lead

A probabilistic match from any database, however scored, is a lead and never a result. PHX will not promote a finding to a conclusion without corroboration from two genuinely independent sources. Two providers reselling the same underlying file count as one, and PHX will say so on the screen.

Cohorts, not names

Gone-away members cluster by employer, by agency, by nationality and by leaving year. Forty members from one dissolved care home group are one research problem with forty answers, not forty problems. PHX resolves the employer chain once, including successor entities and where the payroll records went, and applies it to every member of that cohort. That is where the cost comes out.

It tells you what it could not establish

Every Member Investigation Report states what was not proved as prominently as what was. Not found is a result, with a record of what was tried, not a failure to be buried.

The four outcomes

  • Confirmed contact route

    Two independent sources, with the date each was checked.

  • Located but unreachable

    What is known, and why contact is not currently possible.

  • Not found

    What was tried, source by source, so the scheme can evidence the effort.

  • Deceased, where established

    Flagged for the scheme own process.

How it will work

  1. You upload your member list. Blanks are recorded as facts. We never fill a gap with a guess.
  2. PHX groups the list into cohorts by employer, agency, nationality and leaving year.
  3. It resolves each employer chain once: successor company, administrator, where payroll records went.
  4. It gathers evidence from public registers and permitted sources, cheapest and freest first, and records every call with its result.
  5. A human investigator reviews every case before anything is released to you. Nothing reaches your scheme automatically.

The reasoning is done by a single Investigation Engine that reads the evidence. It proposes what to test and writes the explanation. It never writes a fact and never decides an outcome.

Audit

  • Every conclusion links to the evidence behind it.
  • Every source query is recorded with its timestamp and its raw response retained.
  • The evidence record is append only. A correction is a new entry, never an edit.
  • Reports export as PDF and as JSON, so your own systems can hold the record.
  • Cost and effort per case are visible, so you can evidence proportionality.

What PHX will refuse to do

These are design decisions, not gaps.

  • It will not present a probabilistic match as a result.
  • It will not attempt restricted registers.
  • It will not disclose to anyone other than the member that a pension exists.
  • It will not contact a member except in the scheme own approved wording.
  • It will not give financial advice, handle member money, or take a percentage of anything.
  • It will not report a proportion we cannot evidence.

Where PHX sits alongside what we already do

Today PensionHunter runs cross-border tracing for schemes as a service, described on the trustees page, and that service is live. It is delivered by our own researchers, case by case.

PHX is the platform being built underneath it. Design partners get visibility of their own cases in it as it is built, so the work they bring is the work that shapes it.

Become a design partner

We are looking for a small number of schemes and administrators to build this with.

  • What you give: a real set of hard cases, and time from someone who owns the gone-away problem.
  • What you get: the work done on those cases, direct influence on what gets built, and preferential terms when it is commercially available.
  • What we will do before any member data moves: a data processing agreement, a documented retention period, and answers to your security questions in writing.

No member data is required to start the conversation.

PHX is in development. This page describes what it is being built to do, not a system available today. The cross-border tracing service described on our trustees page is live now.

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