“Houston, we have a problem”. Although the DC mission to help employees save up for a pension has been going well with auto enrolment, it is about to stall, unless we find a better way of turning those savings into retirement income....
Administering occupational pension schemes is a tough gig. The past few months have seen a steady stream of new legislation which has meant administrators have had to make significant changes to their processes, systems and documentation...
Trustees issue lots of communications to their beneficiaries. Some are day to day comms, others are a one-off. Some go to the whole membership and others go to one beneficiary. Some are just for information, others require the recipient to...
Running a pension scheme involves making lots and lots of decisions of all shapes and sizes. Decisions which affect just one member through to decisions which affect the whole scheme. Trustees put a lot of time and effort into making good...
Cool (pension scheme) runnings – working with your administrator Administering a pension scheme is not easy and the bar keeps getting higher with new requirements such as the statutory transfer checks and the stronger nudge to guidance....
Many trustees will, from time to time, find themselves contacted directly by members with questions and requests for information about their pension benefits. Trustees generally want to help out members wherever they can. However, despite...
These days defined benefit schemes buy annuities as part of a bulk exercise to manage liabilities and ultimately wind-up the scheme. However, in the past many schemes bought annuities in the name of the trustee with different insurers as...
New regulations (with accompanying regulatory guidance from TPR) came into force on 30 November introducing significant changes to the statutory transfer regime, to empower trustees to halt suspicious transfers. Whilst administration is...
As Sarah Henderson mentioned in her recent blog, “Why the rules are just the beginning…”, one of the key steps in building a benefit specification for a bulk annuity policy is adding in admin practice. So why is admin practice so...
Following on from my August 2021 blog post on the DWP’s plans to introduce simpler annual benefit statements, we have now had some time to digest the DWP’s response in October to its consultation and the finalised Regulations, which...
