A short week but a few interesting news stories. The chief executive of the Pensions Regulator Charles Counsell is to step down. By and large it seems most think he has done a pretty good job.
Perhaps Richard Lloyd, former Which? boss who has just taken over as interim chair of the FCA, should pay heed. It is clearly a challenging time to be heading up the regulator, but it also begs the question of why it is so difficult to find a permanent candidate.
A look at the CII accounts by Money Marketing notes that while they’ve declared a group surplus, they also saw a trading loss of more than £4million.
There are a lot of quotes from disgruntled sources, though not quoted by name. It may be best for concerned advisers to read the story and perhaps the recent accounts for the CII for themselves. Interesting tack not to quote by name in such a critical article.
Global equities have begun to perform better in the past week or so simply because valuations are much more reflective of economic reality, according to Rupert Thompson, chief investment officer at Kingswood.
Pension providers have to give customers - both advised and non-advised - a stronger nudge to Pension Wise when they decide to access their savings from the start of this month but with some complaints from advisers who suggest advised clients don’t need these nudges.
Corporate Adviser magazine has an interesting interview with Anders Lundström, CEO of Sweden's dashboard MinPension.se.
This passage may be of interest to the pensions industry.
“This has been one of the critical success factors. Pension companies can tell their clients to go into the dashboard for future predictions of their estimated retirement income. In that way they get a lot of use and benefit from it as they don’t have to build the same functionality into their own systems. This can reduce costs."
Some advisers suggest their clients do not agree with HSBC’s now suspended head of responsible investing Stuart Kirk. He offered a pretty harsh assessment of ESG and climate change in the past few weeks. Advisers say their clients see the potential for returns. This discussion looks set to rumble on.
