In 2024 alone, over 20,000 BeneSearch reports were completed – resulting in saving homes from foreclosure and providing life-saving medical benefits. In a recent webinar, we took a closer look into identifying and finding beneficiaries and discussed:
- Why locating beneficiaries is a complicated process.
- How BeneSearch dives deep to provide address history, spouse/relative information, marriage/divorce records and death records.
- Stories of how BeneSearch has helped organizations and the participants/policyholders they serve.
Our webinar speakers included:
- Mike Irey, Director of Operations at Berwyn
- Lindsey Tate-McDonald, Revenue Director at Berwyn
- Jack Hartwig, Marketing Manager at Berwyn
Webinar Transcript
Jack
Welcome, everyone! Thank you for joining us for our webinar solving the beneficiary puzzle, a game-changing solution for plan administrators. My name is Jack Hartwig, Marketing Manager here at The Berwyn Group, and I’ll be your moderator for today’s session. We know that tracking down beneficiaries can be one of the most challenging and critical aspects of plan administration, whether it’s navigating outdated contact information, untangling complex family relationships, or locating areas across the country. It’s a time-consuming process that carries both fiduciary risk and administrative burden, and that’s where BeneSearch comes in. So today we’re excited to walk you through how BeneSearch helps solve this puzzle with precision and compassion. We’ll explore how our solution identifies and connects beneficiaries with the benefits they’re owed, often in ways that have life-changing impact. Throughout this session, we’ll share real life impact stories, dive into key product capabilities, and discuss specific use cases to help you understand how BeneSearch can fit into your workflow. Joining us today, we have Mike Irey, Director of Operations here at The Berwyn Group and Lindsay Tate-McDonald, Director of Project Revenue and myself. So, Lindsey, I will move things over to you. We’re going to talk a little bit about scope and some real-life impact stories that we’ve seen in the recent past around our BeneSearch and beneficiary search process.
Lindsey
Perfect. Thanks, Jack, and thank you everyone for joining today. So we find, typically, when we’re working with our clients that there’s two kind of main challenges when it comes to locating beneficiaries. One, either their just missing information completely, so there was nothing in plain documents that designated a beneficiary. Maybe these were inherited plans where over the course of time that information was just lost. Sometimes clients are utilizing really outdated databases where they’re manually typing information, or it’s on paper document. It’s just no longer legible. It’s very common. The other most common issue that we have with our clients today is, they’re unsure. There might be a named beneficiary, but they’re unsure of where that person is living and have no contact information, so sometimes they’re rather old documents that they’re working with. It might have been 20 years or so since the participant completed one of those beneficiary forms, and they might have a name, but that’s really all. Or they could have a name and an address. But that’s been 20 plus years. They’re no longer working there or not working there, but living there, no other additional contact information. And so over the course of the years we’ve had this common complaint from clients and challenge from clients and we really wanted to listen and help them find a solution and that’s where we created BeneSearch. We’re going to talk about it a little bit later and how that fits in with meeting DOL recommendations. But this is a service that’s been growing rapidly over the years. We’ve probably been servicing about the last three or four years or so, and just within 2024, we’ve had over 20,000 clients submit for this service where we’re able to provide this information back to them. And so, I wanted to talk about just two very specific recent impact stories where we really love hearing from our clients, how we are helping in ways besides just providing data back. We love hearing how does what we provide really make a difference in these participants and beneficiary lives, of which we provide this information to. So, the first story that I wanted to mention was one where just information didn’t even exist and so this was we were working with an administrator on behalf of a corporate pension plan. They had they had received information that the participant had passed away. They did not have any beneficiary information on file whatsoever for this participant. They had submitted to the search and this was actually a really challenging one because we actually found that there were no living relatives, so there was no spouses. There were no living first-degree relatives that we could find, we were able to dig pretty deep and we were able to find one contact information. We weren’t quite sure how they were related, but it was our best bet. That administrator reached out to them and that ended up being they confirmed there was no any family members whatsoever. He didn’t even have any children. He was actually a lifelong friend, had been friends for 20-30 years. He was a designated as the power of attorney, but the communication back to the client was there was no way we were going to find this person right that we were at a dead end. We didn’t know what to do and it was pretty spectacular that we were able to dig up this known friend of his for so long and be able to make that connection and get that money out to the right person. The next success story is one where it has not only an impact on a specific beneficiary, but we also learned that it impacted thousands of children as well. So it’s a really good, heartfelt story. We work with a large multi-employer pension plan. We currently provide death audit information so through the death audit we found that this this participant was deceased. They did not have any beneficiary information on file and this plan is slightly unique in which that the they’re always looking for a spouse, but it’s not at the time when the participant had deceased. It’s actually the time at which their annuity start date is from. Because they haven’t identified this was an older death. They were using another death audit provider before us, so it was an older death that they had identified. There was no beneficiary information on. We were able to take that information and identify the spouse and which that annuity start date was. So not necessarily who is married to at the time of death. This woman’s name is Mary. We’re going to send out a link to you guys after this webinar. If you guys want to listen to more about later. But she was unaware that she was even due a benefit. The employer plan contacted her. She was due $41,000. This woman was very special because she actually worked with the charitable program called Operation Christmas Child in which she put together these shoe boxes of toys and she would deliver them out to children that were in dire need, right? So these were children that are affected by war and poverty. And so this money allowed her to continue on with this program, deliver toys to thousands and thousands of children. We’re not taking credit for delivering all those toys to the children, but it’s a great story to show that we’re not only impacting one particular person, but we can impact the lives of many, many people along the way. We’re going to kick it off to Mike Irey. He’s going to talk to you more about the details around what goes into a BeneSearch.
Mike
Great. Thanks, Lindsey. And as Lindsey mentioned, my team is the one that, reviews this, but we’d love to hear stories and as Lindsey mentioned about the stories of just two representatives, that’s two out of 20,000 that could have this benefit. My team really appreciates that and helps kind of make them strive to do even more. And really helps find the information that’s needed. As you know a little bit about some of the challenges Lindsey mentioned, no information, outdated information or maybe, we have multiple different sources and they’re not quite adding up. You don’t know where to look. There’s also a timing aspect could be older. We’ve done these. For people going back into the 1980s or 90s, when you’re looking for data, people have passed. So timing aspect of it, the whole thing we understand it’s a challenge and we’ve seen it all. As Lindsey mentioned, you know we did 20,000. We’ve been doing this for well over five years closer to 10 years really. So, we have a team that’s been doing you know 10s of thousands of these and really understands the unique challenges that some of this can bring. So, a little bit about the service as it says here, we provide the answers what we’re looking to do is help you identify the spouse initially, that’s our main goal. The reason for that is a lot of plans are written looking for the spouse. So, our main focus is to try to provide some information about the spouse, whether they’re married or divorced, what this person’s name was, their date of birth, their location, and as many as we can find, we’ve had it. I know we’ve done at least five marriage and divorces for somebody, but you know we will look for all marriage and divorce, not the most recent or not just one. We’ll look for all of them. After that we’ll look for any first-degree relative we can find. We define first-degree relative as any parent sibling or child as well as spouse. You know when we’re looking at the same information, we would as a spouse, you know name, date of birth, location, it shows us the phone number. So you know their name and their contact information that you can reach out to them if need be for any information as our stats show here, you know 80% of the time will give you an answer on the spouse whether they’re married or not, or never married, you know, and then at least 95% of the time, we’ll find at least one first degree relative. What we might not do is find all first-degree relatives. We don’t want to guess if we don’t have the accurate location and phone number for them, so we might not list all the people that are possible, but we want to give you as many as we can find. Lindsey also mentioned other people that we could find from time to time. We also come across people that may not be first-degree relatives but might have some sort of connection. Whether it’s a lifelong friend, or you know, a power of attorney or an estate attorney or somebody like that. It could even be a cousin or somebody. That information could be provided to you as well. Might not be as impactful, but sometimes you never know and you know the example Lindsey shared, it was actually really impactful. So, we’ll try to provide as many of them up to you and we can give up to 15 of those relatives, as I mentioned, we have team of experts that have been doing this for years, 10s of thousands of them. Each person has reviewed. We have a reviewer and then a quality control check on that. So, we really want to make sure that all the data that we can find we can provide to you. It can be tricky. They can get into the details and certainly family relationships and understanding who’s actually related to this person. We do a really thorough job in making sure we understand the relationships as we mentioned here, you know we have a proprietary database of obituaries and other sources that we’ve been using for years and constantly updating to make sure we have the most accurate information. And then in Step 3 it’s we won’t just and I’ll talk about it in the next slide. We won’t just pull back the obituary, but we’ll look for marriage and divorce records to the extent we can find a death source, death records, any other source we can use, we try to find as many sources as needed as necessary to ensure that we have the proper and updated information sent over to you. A little bit about the reporting, we actually provide the report in two formats here. We’re showing you the PDF version. It’s typically a two-page document. We also have an Excel version. The PDF version is all the information that we have. We want to be transparent, so any information. You can find we’re sending it to you. We will give you a full summary on the person you provided to us. Most people are deceased, but we want to make sure that we can confirm their name, their address, their social date of birth, any locations they might have, as well as their death, if they aren’t unknown, some of this known deceased we will also provide that back to you. And then how we found out their death, whether it’s in the death record state or DMF hit and in an obituary as well. So, you get the full obituary, you get the full URL link to that obituary. The sources where we found the death as well. If you go back to the bottom left of this, you’ll see all the relatives here, their relationship, their name, their address, their phone number, their date of birth and age as well. And then in the upper right, you’ll see marriage and divorce record. You know who is married or divorced, the date, the state that we found it. If we have the filing number, we’ll provide that to you and as many as possible will be listed here on the Excel. It’s similar to this information. It’s all on one line and written across. And the goal there is to allow you to quickly and easily take this information and put it into your system. You know PDF version if you have to kind of take that and recreate that would be time consuming. The Excel version is supposed to be similar information, just in a different format to allow you to easily put it into your database or system to action off of that. We’re trying to be as complete and as thorough as possible on the Excel, we will split it up based on the spousal relationship, so again, it’s easy for you to see how many you found in any one opportunity and we also provide a one-pager that quickly summarizes our information which is really helpful for clients to provide us 20, 50, 100, 1,000 or 2,000 people requests they find that one page summary on how we did on the number of spouses we found, the number of marriage records. You know, how many people, how many spouses were deceased, how many spouses were alive? How many people were not married and those sorts of things. You’ll get at the end of a report as well, so things you can have for regulators with the PDF document, things you have the Excel file quickly and easily. You can add it into your system and we’re also always available for comments, questions or thoughts on any report done. Most of our reports are done, you know, within a week. It depends on file size, but the majority of the requests are relatively small. Anything under 10 records and we usually turn that around in a week. Two large files, you know ones over 100 / 1,000, we talked with the clients on what their deliverable, you know data is needed and you know how many they needed anyone given time as most clients aren’t able to handle too much at anyone given time, so we want to make sure that we are providing this information to them and in a cadence that allows them to action the results. That’s the update on the process and the reporting aspect of it.
Jack
Great. Before we dive into the use cases situation, I have a question for both of you here. In your professional experience with this BeneSearch solution and what you’ve seen out there, what in your opinion, is the best time to run BeneSearch? From a, you know, just a general timing standpoint.
Lindsey
Sure. Yeah, we find the best timing to retrieve information on their relative is as close to the day to death of that participant as possible. You know a large source of information that we’re getting is some commercial database sources. When somebody has passed away, the information that gets put into sources like that will soon fall out. The older there is because they’re not using things like a Social Security Number that feeds into source and databases and sources like that. So really, if there is a benefit, a benefit that’s due to a beneficiary, as close to that death like I said as possible, it doesn’t mean that it has to be that year, right? But we typically find. I’ll let my guy fact check me, but usually, between 5 and 10 years, we’ll probably have information on there much after 10 years is kind of when we start seeing it drop out. And it’s really hard to identify as many relatives as we possibly can. Not saying that we can’t identify any relatives, right? But when we talked about how robust this report is and we can report up to 15 relatives in there, you’ll start noticing that kind of decrease after that 10 year period. And we want to give you the most success, right? We try to give you enough information that you possibly have to, make these connections and find the person that you’re looking for.
Mike
I would agree with that. You know, after 10 years data in that 5-10 year range data can sometimes start falling off and you start missing some connection you might not have missed originally and plus the sooner we can get this turned around to this year you can get the benefit out to the person that needs it, right? Because that’s what this is all about, right, helping people that have benefits due to them, get them the benefit and allow that to impact their lives.
Jack
Thank you very much for that. And then Lindsey, I’ll pass it back to you to talk about some use cases.
Lindsey
Yeah. And so there’s certainly a number of different reasons of why benefits are due to a beneficiary that we have listed out here. But I think it’s important to think about why our clients utilize any search and we formulate a lot of our services around DOL best practices. It’s always on the top of people’s minds what do they need to do. What that search efforts look like? When is it? When is it enough? Right. So we focus a lot and put a lot of emphasis on that, not only with this many search product but with a lot of our locations, a couple other services as well. But I think it’s important when we talk about best practices is things that you should be thinking about is one of the things listed is using online search tools right, which is built into BeneSearch. Using a paid locator service like us, right? So, we have access to a lot of different data sources that we use to pull into our services that we provide. There’s best practices as communication type methods with sending out mailings or making phone calls. That’s why we kind of provide that information in these many search reports. We’re trying to give you everything that you need to make direct contact with these possible beneficiaries. Making sure that you have a death audit process. We not only have that as a standalone product, but we look for and confirm death information through the BeneSearch not only for the participant, but we’re able to pull in some death information for the spouse as well. And then there’s other things that are not technically built in right into BeneSearch, but other things to think about as far as like sending certified mail or mailings in general, which you could always with the information that we’re providing you through the BeneSearch, you can certainly turn around and send out that kind of sort of communication. But what we’re really trying to do is we’re trying to streamline a process for our clients. I had mentioned that in the beginning before. There’s two common problems or challenges when we have talked to clients that are looking for beneficiaries, is not having any information at all and having outdated information and that’s really what we’re trying to solve with BeneSearch. We’re trying to make it easy for you. When you fall into those two categories, giving you a really great service that is going to give you all the answers that really guide you into the next steps and making communication with the right people which is obviously a challenge in the industry.
Jack
Thanks for that, Lindsey. Couple of questions here for the group. I know we’re down to about 6 minutes left. So I’ll we’ll just pick a few. Mike, you talked about your team and the validation efforts that that go into this process to provide those robust report. You know, we like to say our results are validated and a lot of you know what can happen is there was I guess in your opinion, what’s the difference between a potential match and that validated match? What really makes you feel confident that that is a confirmed match and you’re confident in that result?
Mike
Great question for BeneSearch. If we only have one source of information for somebody’s name and address and phone number, we will say that’s possible. When we have two sources, we’ll have that confirmed. We take a more cautious approach to that. But you know we don’t if we have one source, we’ll certainly provide it to you. But, having that second source can validate that information, we’ll call it possible or just confirmed information for the relatives.
Jack
Fantastic. Great, Lindsey, this one coming to you. I know we have quite a few of our clients on this call for individuals that are currently using our portal. Is there a simple way to order BeneSearch or is that a different process? What does that really look like if someone’s looking to add a BeneSeach process into their workflow.
Lindsey
Yeah. So, there’s two different options. And so, one, you can order it as a standalone product. It’s a drop-down option from the portal there’s also a great option where when we talk about locating missing participants and also identifying beneficiaries, we try to roll that up into one easy way to order. So, with our locate services, one in particular research, we make outreach to participants, they had the death audit. Right up on the front of that and so right away we were able to understand who’s deceased on your population and may be owed a benefit. And so you have the option right from if you’re, if you’re doing outreach for participants in general, you find out that they are deceased, you can actually have an option that sends all those deceased participants straight to BeneSearch. We find that it’s a more effective way than sending letters to known deceased participants in hopes that you return or get a response. A common challenge too, and if you do reach out to beneficiaries yourselves directly, sometimes those beneficiaries or those potential beneficiaries are unaware that a benefit may be due to them, right? They might not recognize the company name or are just unaware of that there is a possible benefit. And so through BeneSeach you’re really contacting those direct people and sending very specific outreach. Location then through like a general locate mailing where there might be unaware they don’t respond. The chance of reaching somebody at a deceased participants last-known address is challenging, too. They may not live there, so we find that people do that do respond to those letters when somebody is deceased. They’re not usually the intended folks that they’re trying to find a lot of times our clients are specific and then trying to find a spouse. A lot of those responses we get from letters like that could be from a friend and neighbor, an ex-spouse and ex-fiancé. Kind of all across the board, right, has a pretty low response. And so with BeneSearch you’re getting that targeted information, we’re giving exactly the people that you should reach out, you can let them know exactly what’s going on and have the custom message to them. So, it’s just a much more effective way that if you do have known deceased participants, the goal is to identify a beneficiary and get a benefit and that’s BeneSearch, really. It’s streamlining the process and getting in contact and the people that you need right away.
Mike
And, if I can just add that we did an analysis for a client who for years would send us a similar population to mail out letters. And we noticed that a decent percent of that were likely to deceased and our response rate for that was somewhere in that 10 to 15% range and that was pretty consistent for years. And we talked about BeneSearch and they decided to do a BeneSearch and then mail letters to the people that we found. And I think the response rate was somewhere in the 70 to 75% range. So, a significant increase because they targeted the right people. With the right letters and the right message, they were able to get benefits. And there were also a number of people that they realized well, we don’t have to keep sending letters because they don’t have a surviving spouse. They don’t have anyone that was still surviving, so I think a pretty significant savings over time once they went that route. So yeah, another benefit to BeneSearch.
Jack
Fantastic. That takes us right up here to the end of our time together today. Big thank you to Lindsey and Mike for joining us and sharing about BeneSearch. As you can see really the ripple effect that just finding one beneficiary can make on a global scale is a really cool story. Thank you all so much for joining us today. We’ll see you next time and once again, thank you very much and have a wonderful rest of your day.
Find more information on BeneSearch here.
