Our pensions review of 2011

A New Year and in January developments in de-risking throughout 2010 were discussed. How would 2011 fare in comparison? February hosted a long and sometimes confusing conversation about PIPs. Turns out it’s simple,……… honestly! In a busy month of March we aired our opinions and gave a spring clean to these pieces:

• Transition to auto enrolment will not be automatic
• Watch out older people, Booth and Taylor are coming
• The public sector pensions challenge
• Gender based annuity pricing, Haruspicy and the end of science

Help for schools and colleges showed we are no fools in April with some guidance on FRS17 disclosures. The joys of spring were not abound in May as we lost an “f” in pensions. There never was one?  I think you’ll ind…….. Inflation and its effects were being discussed in June as another quarter sees the inflation targets go by unachieved. On a more positive note the Actuarial Profession was inflated with a new influx of talented graduates from Queen’s University. We were there to welcome them to the industry and indeed are nurturing some of that talent within our business today. Individuality was the theme of July’s hot topics. Section 75 Regulations fail to recognise the plight of the unattached charitable organisations among multi employer schemes. And, as tPR guidance on Incentive Exercises suggests trustees start with the view that they will not be in the members’ interests, we ask just how much trustees should assume all members have the same needs? In August we tried to make sense of babysitting pensioners and whether they were truly responsible enough to take care of their own finances. September brought another egg to the NEST in the form of NOW Pensions as a rival. All good sport or will it be rotten? November saw us pushing the limits of data management. Are Trustees using all the tools at their disposal to  improve their data and meet tPR’s  deadline? December and we are back to de-risking and not much festive cheer. We feature our article in the Actuarial Post.