Pensions: research working parties

Pensions – The Future of Pensions Dashboards: An Actuarial Perspective Working Party is focused on the pensions dashboard and member communications.

Key objectives

What can actuaries contribute to the challenge of providing a pensions dashboard to members, and enabling them to understand the risks and opportunities their current saving affords them?

Terms of reference (37 KB Word doc)

About

Chair: Andrew Lowe
Established: 2024

Collective defined contribution (CDC) schemes are a new kind of pension scheme for the UK, featuring fixed contributions, investing collectively, and paying variable income for life.

CDC schemes bring advantages for workers and employers over other pension designs and also bring new challenges for pension design and management. Actuaries have a large part to play in this work.

CDC schemes were first enabled in the UK by the Pension Schemes Act 2021, with further variations due to be enabled in future. The UK’s first CDC scheme was approved by the regulator in 2023.

The IFoA aims to aid the development of UK CDC pensions in the public interest.

The working party works to support this aim, including by:

• developing thinking in CDC and other collective risk sharing schemes
• engaging with external stakeholders such as DWP and the regulator
• commenting externally on CDC

About

Chair: Keith McInally
Established: 2018

Terms of reference (PDF, 170 KB)

This working party seeks to explore whether a default approach to dealing with divorce reports is possible. And, if not, to create a guideline setting out what is and is not appropriate. It also seeks to understand whether there could be a more efficient approach to dealing with pensions providers.

About

Chair: Ian Sharpe
Established: 2024

The Personal Financial Planning Working Party looks at how actuaries’ skills can be used to improve personal financial planning among individuals.

Key objectives

Our key objectives include:

• Considering how actuaries can acquire the necessary skills to work directly with individuals;
• Reviewing how actuarial skills can be used to support the delivery of financial advice; and
• Drawing on our experience of working with pension scheme trustees and sponsoring employers to contribute to public policy discussions related to personal financial planning.

Planned outputs

• Respond to FCA consultation GC20/1 by 4 September 2020
• Provide recommendations to the education committee on adding material relevant to advising individuals on personal financial planning in the syllabus for actuarial exams – end of 2020
• Develop a policy statement on how we think actuaries can help individuals with personal financial planning – end of 2020.

About

Chair: Andrew Kemp
Established: 2020

Objectives

This working party will build on the work undertaken by the previous dynamic discount rate working party, including: 

1. Addressing/investigating the limitations that were acknowledged by the previous working party. This includes consideration of using a stochastic modelling approach and the complexities caused by pension increases that are subject to caps and collars.
2. Further consideration of practical issues and challenges in implementing this approach that may limit the effectiveness of using a dynamic discount rate approach.
3. Investigation of the benefits/drawbacks of using a dynamic discount rate approach in run-on scenarios, having regard for the potential implications of the 2023 Mansion House proposals.

About

Chair: TBC

Established: 2025