Reading Time: 10 minutes The Work & Pensions Select Committee (WPSC) Pension Protection Fund and Pensions Regulator inquiry consultation certainly attracted a good number of responses. I count almost a hundred in that list and presumably not all are yet published! Most of the major investment & actuarial advisory firms are represented there, as well as PPF and The Pensions … More Consulting firms reply to the WPSC Inquiry
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: < 1 minute My TED-style talk from our January 2016 unconference on some of the trends in UK pensions de-risking over the last decade
Reading Time: 2 minutes The first 2016 update of the PPF index (of UK defined benefit pension funds) is just out, and it wasn’t pretty Falling long-dated interest rates over the month (the 30 year gilt rate fell by 0.3% to 2.3%) caused the present value of the liabilities to increase by some 6%, while the assets were virtually unchanged (presumably … More Pension Funding Levels Plunge in January 2016
Reading Time: 2 minutes The PPF today published its monthly estimates of scheme funding position for the schemes in the PPF 7800 index. Not surprisingly, given the market moves over September 2015, and over the third quarter generally we saw a 5% decline in funded status over the quarter due to both declining asset values and increasing liabilities. It’s … More Mind the gap – funding levels fall as market volatility hits assets
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
Reading Time: 2 minutes Any pension scheme looking to produce a valuation as at 30 June 2015 is likely to be showing a more favorable overall position than they would have done in March 2015 or December 2014 (as demonstrated by data from the PPF 7800 index of pension funds updated to May 2015 below). The overall funding level … More Rates Rollercoaster Continues
