Editorial: A fair fight?

In public, managers are queuing up to tell you why their product meets the requirements of the post-annuity world, and why their competitors have been knocked out on their feet.

Behind the scenes, they are reassessing what they have around income drawdown and whether new products should be launched.

The trend towards actively managed, multi-asset strategies (see page seven), brings this argument into focus. So far, ‘smoothing’ is carrying the day, with providers and managers more worried about the backlash from a volatile savings journey than the backlash from an disappointingly sized final pension pot.

And with managers waking up to the potential of the UK target date market, this week sees LGIM’s Emma Douglas helpfully addressing some of the downsides of that current DC investment fashion.

Let the managers slug it out, and let the best strategy win.

Illustration by Ben Jennings

Costs and benefits

More data are always welcomed by journalists, and the Pensions Regulator's survey on the running costs of DB schemes should provide interesting reference points for future analysis on the market.

The undoubted value of this research, though, is for private sector schemes to benchmark themselves against each other in a way that their public sector counterparts have been able to do much more easily.

I have to admit it is hard to get excited by results showing a variety in costs paid by a variety of schemes. We know smaller schemes pay more per head.

But more worrying is another figure: only 35 per cent of schemes with more than 5,000 members were able to detail all their investment costs.

A greater proportion of small schemes (37 per cent of those with 12-99 members) could provide this information. The campaign for DC transparency should be matched in DB. And in this case, big does not always mean more transparent.

Ian Smith is editor of Pensions Expert. You can follow him on Twitter @iankmsmith and the team @pensions_expert.