Assent Consulting - helping you to select the right advisers for your pension scheme

The Pensions Regulator has recently announced a renewed focus on the governance of pensions schemes.

There are a large number of organisations that are available to advise either trustees or companies on the various aspects of their benefit schemes and the market place is constantly evolving with new services being offered to help trustees to carry out their duties. We aim to help Trustees to pick the right advisers for their schemes.

In order to achieve this, we feel that it is very important that trustees consider the range of skills that they have available to them within the trustees, the company and their consultants to ensure that the scheme can be run as effectively as possible.

Trustees should be able to challenge their advisers rather than just accept recommendations without challenge - where they are not able to do this they should consider how they might be able to reach this position.

At Assent Consulting we look to help Trustees to review their advisers and where necessary, help them appoint alternative or additional professionals to help them run their arrangements more efficiently.

Giles Payne.

My View

The role of Investment consultants can broadly be split into to areas - investment strategy and manager selection. In general manager selection naturally follows on from the strategy that is set by the trustees.

With detailed analysis of recommendations and subsequent monitoring of the strategy Trustees will a better chance of being sold unnecessarily complex and expensive investment solutions.

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