Professor Chris Sier, a champion of cost transparency in the investment industry, has died of cancer. He was 58.
His work led to enhanced investment cost disclosures across public and private sector pensions, and he helped create reporting templates that remain in use by hundreds of institutions.
He led the Financial Conduct Authority’s Institutional Disclosure Working Group (IDWG), which designed the templates, and later founded ClearGlass Analytics, which specialises in collecting and analysing the costs paid by institutional investors to asset managers. The firm has published a series of papers based on its findings.
Sier worked closely with the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) in 2017 and 2018 to help develop its Code of Transparency for investment management costs. The reporting template brought greater clarity to previously undisclosed costs being levied on pension funds.
This work led to his appointment to lead the IDWG, which adapted the LGPS model for the wider pensions sector under the Cost Transparency Initiative in 2019.
Presenting the template to a PLSA (now Pensions UK) event in 2017, Sier told pensions industry representatives: “If you get this right, it turns over the entire marketplace in the UK and makes it transparent. That’s not £217bn [the total assets of the LGPS in 2017], that’s £3.5trn. You would have a significant impact on the lives of all consumers in the UK who have pension funds.”
Beyond pensions, Sier was a committed advocate of financial technology and innovation in the north of England, and he chaired FinTech North from 2018 until stepping down earlier this year for health reasons.
In 2016, the Treasury appointed him as the UK’s “fintech envoy” to help promote the country’s tech sector to an international audience.
FinTech North announced in September that it would name the opening slot at its annual conference the Chris Sier Keynote in tribute. The organisation said: “This brief for this slot will be to deliver an insightful talk, laced with deep industry expertise, strong calls to action, and with a free licence to share provocative views. This is what Chris has always brought to our events, and they were all the more memorable for it.”
Sier wrote a series of columns on costs and disclosure for Pensions Expert in 2020.
Below, you can watch Chris’s 2016 TEDx talk on asset management costs, during which he talks about his career, how he got into financial services, and the problem of opacity in the pension fund sector – ably assisted by his children.
