All Opinion articles – Page 85
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Opinion
Industry Champion award among 2015's PIPA categories
Entries are open for the 2015 Pension and Investment Provider Awards, where we celebrate excellence among providers of products and services to UK pension schemes.
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OpinionEditorial: Pensions fortune-telling
A hot topic of conversation last week was Channel 4’s Dispatches programme on the impact of the imminent pension freedoms, as the government launched its Pension Wise guidance service.
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Opinion
How your scheme can benefit from the VAT changes
Fresh guidance from HM Revenue & Customs on VAT charges for scheme management services may have passed people by during the holiday slowdown.
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Opinion
Exploring the impact of the new money purchase definition
Sackers’ Zoë Murphy looks at which schemes may be affected by the definition change and what they might need to do from April – including paying the Pension Protection Fund levy, actuarial valuations and assessing underpins.
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Opinion
Five objectives and five risks for DC
Before the 2014 Budget, investment objectives for defined contribution schemes were relatively straightforward.
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Opinion
What could a Conservative government mean for pensions?
Today’s pensions landscape looks very different from five years ago. During that time, we have had a Budget that heralded the most significant pensions reforms for the past 30 years.
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Opinion
How to run a beauty parade to find the best adviser for your scheme
Any other business: The time comes when every scheme needs to hire new advisers. But in an industry with such a diverse range of skills, how can you be sure you are hiring the right one?
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OpinionEditorial: Unsolved problems
Ah, the fading hope of a new year. Inevitably, despite the equity market recovery in December, volatility had never left global markets.
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Opinion
We have the ombudsman cases we wanted – but they provide cold comfort
When the pensions ombudsman published its first determination on a pensions liberation case late last year, I blogged that the key cases for schemes would be where trustees had blocked suspect transfers. The first few of those have now been made public.
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Opinion
Tax allowance boost could buffer SMEs against rising AE costs
The Association of Consulting Actuaries has called for action to help alleviate the financial pressure on small companies resulting from the statutory increases in auto-enrolment contributions.
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Opinion
PPF: How the pensions landscape is changing
Our Purple Book is based on the individual data for all PPF-eligible pension schemes. This means a dataset of more than 6,000 schemes containing more than 11m members, with upwards of £1tn in assets.
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Opinion
How the DB code's employer growth objective affects scheme funding
The Pensions Regulator last summer published a revised version of Code of Practice 3 for funding defined benefit pension schemes.
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Opinion
Why relief doesn't come easy with pensions tax
Nobody understands it. It gives the greatest benefit to the wealthy. And it simply is not working as an incentive to get people saving into a pension. We are, of course, talking pensions tax relief.
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Opinion
Six hurdles for DB and DC schemes to get over in 2015
By now, you'll have waded through all manner of 2014 round-ups, but what lies ahead for the pension trustee or scheme manager is certainly more pressing.
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Opinion
What schemes can learn from this year’s top 5 legal stories
Legal rulings on issues including increased pension loss payouts, clarification on RPI guidance and the introduction of new accounting reporting frameworks have challenged schemes to respond and factor in these changes in the year ahead.
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Opinion
Schemes say cost-saving key advantage of technology
Pension schemes put time-saving and cost-saving first when it comes to their reasons for using technology, rather than engaging scheme members or informing advisers, a survey has found.
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Opinion
Five entirely depressing findings from the DC charges audit
If the workplace pensions industry should be judged by how it treats its existing customers, then today's revelations on scheme charges find it at best unfair and at worst extortionate.
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Opinion
Lafarge, Channel 4 and Lloyds feature in the top five derisking stories of 2014
Many schemes worked hard this year to make a dent in their pension fund deficit as liabilities soared, employing methods ranging from simple payment increases to complex recovery plans.
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Opinion
Nationwide, Strathclyde and British Coal among top five 2014 investment stories
Ditching hedge funds, the rise of responsible investment and the growing success of property mandates have all featured in a tricky year for UK pension fund investment.
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Opinion
Why the pensions liberation determination was not the one we needed
The pensions ombudsman published yesterday the first of his long-awaited pensions liberation determinations. But it was not exactly the kind of case the industry has been awaiting.