Strategic Finance

New pensions service for finance professionals

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Written by Catherine Murray   
Thursday, 07 August 2008
A specialist service has been launched to support FD’s managing workplace pensions.

FD PensionsConnection, launched by the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), is free for a year and will provide information and support to financial professionals involved in their organisation’s workplace pension issues.

The launch of the service follows from the results of a survey by the NAPF and ICAEW, which revealed the extent to which finance directors are concerned about pensions.

The report showed that pensions were the cause of several corporate headaches, despite being an important park of the employment package.

Joanne Segars, NAPF Chief Executive, comments, “Finance Directors are clearly committed to providing a good workplace pension for the employees of their organisation, but the pressure is mounting to make sure schemes are more manageable for the employer.”

“There is a wide spectrum of changes being considered which means the pensions landscape will continue to evolve at a rate of knots,” she adds.

The main concerns for finance directors operating across several different pension schemes included:

  1. The prospect that the company might have to make up the shortfall in the scheme, the unknown cost of pension liabilities and their volatility on the company balance sheet.
  2. An expected further decline in defined benefit (DB) provision and employer engagement over the next 10 years.
  3. The pension might not be adequate when employees eventually retire.

The survey also revealed that finance directors would consider change if their DB funding position improved, including encouraging a more cautious investment strategy (68%) and buying out all or some of the liabilities (57%). Only 9% would improve scheme benefits.

The service will cover pension issues ranging from deficits, rising liabilities, buyouts, conflicts of interest and the impact of pensions on corporate activity.

Segars adds, ““The last decade has seen workplace pension issues filling the in-trays of the finance community as never before and this new service is designed to help them keep on top of it all … as the scope of workplace pensions is becoming more complex by the year.””

The NAPF’s aim is to provide a network where the impact of pensions on the finance function can be discussed, and give finance professionals direct access to the latest developments and thinking.

More information about FD PensionsConnection is available here , and membership is open to anyone in an organisation who is involved in pensions in a financial capacity.

The NAPF and ICAEW report  Finance Directors and Pensions : A View from the Boardroom is available here .

 

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