As the pensions industry braces for significant challenges in 2024 with impending changes in government legislation, regulations, and policies under a new Labour government; Join Professional Pensions for our opening keynote session. Led by our guest esteemed representative from The Pensions Regulator, this session offers a direct update from TPR to you.

This session will address:  

• An update from TPR and its key priorities
• Industry expectations for the future
• Address concerns and questions regarding upcoming regulation
  

Until very recently, the overarching view was that achieving a buyout of a pension scheme's liabilities through an insurance company should be the objective for trustees and sponsors but alternatives to buyout are now rising in popularity.

In this session, we will compare and contrast asset allocations and risk management for low dependency and run-on strategies covering evolution over time. We will also cover the potential use of innovative solutions to access private markets efficiently; retaining the flexibility to pivot should circumstances and objectives change.

Whichever of these objectives you’re aiming for, this session will equip you with some of the important investment know how to succeed.

Following significant improvements in the financial strength of schemes in recent years, many schemes now have more than enough assets to secure pensions with an insurer. Insuring can enable a company (the sponsor) to extinguish its responsibilities to a scheme, but our analysis shows that the best outcome for companies and members may be achieved by deferring insurance. Deferring until the ‘optimal time’, with surplus generated in the interim, may deliver significant value to members (higher pensions) and sponsors (higher distributions of surplus).

This session will address:

• What level of surplus could be generated by deferring a buyout?
• What is the optimal investment strategy for surplus generation?
• How to quantify the downside risk of deferring buyout
• How to identify the ‘optimal time’ to buyout

• How can Trustees keep track of risk settlement progress across all schemes they look after?
• What is the best way to dovetail the engagement strategy for each party?
• When is the right and wrong time to engage? What are the risks and benefits?
• How can we remove the bottleneck in the risk transfer market? 
• Are small schemes really getting attention from insurers? How do you maximise this engagement?
  

The last few years has seen the emergence alternative risk transfer solutions all seeking to use third party capital to support DB schemes on their journey to their end game.

This session will address:

• How capital backed journey plans work
• The benefits they bring to the trustee, members, and sponsor
• A focus on Punter Southall’s capital backed journey plan, the Pension Safeguard Solution, and how it’s flexibility and robust structure opens the bulk annuity market to a wide range of schemes.

• Investing for run-on - have schemes de-risked too far?
• What if run-on isn’t your objective – investing for different end-game options
• Case studies of what actual schemes have done in practice
  

Connection-ready means being 95% prepared to connect to the PDP ecosystem, which must happen for schemes between late 2024 and October 2026. Additionally, schemes must meet dashboard duties post connection, data matching, view requests at scale, report on data coverage rates, and be running on its integrated service provider. The lack of staging deadlines has deprioritised dashboards for many schemes, but that resourcing challenges within the industry mean action is necessary now. Despite guidance on dashboards, it is ultimately the responsibility of trustees to get data matching processes in order. If trustees address these challenges now, they will benefit from cost and time savings once dashboards are launched.

This session will address:

• How will dashboards work in practicality? 
• What are schemes doing to get their data ready for Dashboards?
• What are the challenges with preparing for dashboards and how hard are schemes finding them?
• What can schemes be doing to overcome these challenges?