How does the payout of a supplementary pension take place?

You can already find a lot of information about the taxation of the payout of a supplementary pension on our index page here. We will not go into that in this article for now. As an insurance intermediary, we very often receive, and this already months before retirement, the question: "Can we already submit that payout request now?". We understand that, as an insured person, you want to see your money quickly, and that you have a certain distrust toward the response speed of an insurance company. Well, that distrust is unwarranted. We explain why...

Once you have applied for your pension or early retirement, you automatically have the right to payout of the accumulated pension capital in the second pillar. In other words: whether you want it or not... your policies in the second pillar will be liquidated. And that happens automatically: since 2017, the pension service (which is of course aware of your pension application) informs the MyPension database (which is aware of all your supplementary pensions in the second pillar). MyPension then, in turn, notifies the insurer. The insurer will write to you, as beneficiary of the policy, to provide a number of additional details (e.g. the bank account number to which payment may be made). Everything happens fully automatically, and as the insured person you do not need to do anything until you are contacted by your insurer. The insurer is legally required to proceed with payment of the amount due within 30 days after it has received all the information from you. Does that work reasonably well in practice? Certainly.

Research conducted in 2021 by the FSMA shows that the turnaround time between the statutory pension and the payout of the supplementary pension is, on average, 56 days for group insurance policies or IPTs (an individual pension commitment funded by your company) taken out by companies. Also important is that the payout period (that is: after receipt of all documents from the retiree) is only 10 days. This is remarkably fast.

Conclusion: in most cases, it is better to let this automatic procedure run its course, rather than intervening and informing the insurer in advance. Insurers generally respond very quickly and also pay out very quickly. It is, however, important to promptly provide, yourself, the necessary documents requested by the insurer in connection with your retirement. Life Experts can assist you with this if desired.

Does something nevertheless go wrong? That is often related to the fact that a policy was not registered, or was registered incorrectly, with MyPension (this is still very rarely the case), or to the fact that the statutory pension was not reported to MyPension, or was reported too late (this too is rare). In this case, we, as intermediary, can still inform your insurer on the basis of a certificate of the pension application.