Reading Time: 4 minutes Human longevity is always somewhat of a double-edged sword for those tasked with paying a defined benefit pension: increases in healthy lifespan are of course welcome from a human perspective, but make the job of providing a pension for life that much harder. And longevity has been very hard to forecast with any accuracy: from … More Living Longer, and Prospering
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’m sure you can picture the scene. A group sits down to make a critically important decision. Much discussion follows. One person after another lays out their views, lots of points are made. There are some clear areas of agreement. Nods all round. The answer starts to become clear. With a few changes a consensus … More [Books] Wiser – how group decisions can let us down
Reading Time: 2 minutes “Expected returns don’t pay benefits, cash does” Anthony Hilton recently wrote a stinging attack on pension consultants -like myself- who advise defined benefit pension schemes to measure, and hedge, their liabilities with reference to gilt yields. Here’s one (of several) reasons why he’s wrong. His argument – that you could fund based on the much … More Why Anthony Hilton is Wrong on Pensions
Reading Time: 2 minutes It’s not been a good summer for the financial health of UK DB pension funds. Data released by the PPF in September underlined a summer of bad news for schemes and scheme sponsors. A continued trend of falling gilt yields have seen liability values increase dramatically – adding more than £200bn to the aggregate deficit … More Grim Summer for DB Pensions
Reading Time: 5 minutes This article first appeared in the May 2016 edition of The Actuary magazine (here) The past 10 years have been a uniquely challenging, volatile and uncertain period for UK defined benefit pension schemes. How well have they weathered the storm? We found out by analysing data published by the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) in its … More Taming Pension Risk?
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the final update of the PPF’s index of UK pension funds to be published in 2015, data showed that asset and liability values are set to end 2015 close to where they started, in spite of considerable volatility seen during the year. The overall funding level on the PPF basis was around 83% in November … More UK Pension Liabilities Steady in 2015
Reading Time: 3 minutes A lot has changed since 1962, particularly in the world of finance and pensions. UBS recently published a weighty tome containing some fascinating data on global markets and pension funds: A long-term perspective on pension fund investment Worth a read, one thing I found particularly interesting was the long-term data going back 50 years on … More Changing Times – 50 Years of UK Pensions
Reading Time: 2 minutes The PPF publishes regular updates on the financial health of DB pension schemes in the UK (the PPF 7800 index) and also its own funding position. In recent times there has been quite some contrast between the two sets of figures (thanks to Pensions Expert for a great article highlighting this. Sure, the PPF collects … More What Can Pension Schemes Learn from the PPF ?
Reading Time: < 1 minute We’ve experienced a rollercoaster ride so far this year when it comes to government bond yields. For pension funds that haven’t hedged this risk, this has meant a lot of volatility in their position coming from the liability side of their balance sheet from one month to the next. It’s amazing really that in the 8 … More Snakes, Ladders & Pension Deficits
Reading Time: 2 minutes As the UK Liability Driven Investing (LDI) market has grown over the last decade the KPMG LDI Survey “Navigating the LDI Market” has become a really useful tool for understanding the growth of the market at a high level and who the major players are from an asset management perspective. The latest version of the survey, … More LDI Continues to Thrive – 5 Takeaways from the KPMG Survey
