Last year Royal Mail became the first UK company to launch its own collective scheme. Is CDC here to stay?

So far the Scottish government has not issued a pooling mandate, but whether the UK government’s pension reform agenda fails to make it north of the border remains to be seen

British pensions minister Torsten Bell is worried about conflicts of interest in the professional trustee and investment consultants markets

Rachel Elwell, chief executive of Border to Coast, raises the prospect that the long-awaited pension dashboard might encourage savers to question how much exposure they have to private assets

Torsten Bell told the Pensions UK conference he does not believe he will need to use the powers given to him by the pension schemes bill to force funds to invest in UK assets

Richard Law-Deeks thinks that by 2030 there may be as few as four local government pension scheme pools in England and Wales

Pensions UK’s head of parliamentary affairs Katy Little said she had never seen a bill move as quickly though parliament as the pension schemes bill.

Moves in the US are afoot to make it easier for pensions to invest in crypto - with Harvard’s endowment a prominent asset owner to do so. But is a similar trend in play on this side of the Atlantic?

Mercer studied 52 countries and found 77 per cent of them impose some sort of investment restriction

The 21 LGPS abandoned by the closure of the Access and Brunel pools have all found a home, but the Isle of Wight Pension Fund isn’t happy with its lot

Last year a host of asset owners terminated mandates with hedge fund managers but the tide may have turned.

Retail investors have been pulling money out of ESG investments for several years as enthusiasm for the style turns negative. Is this reflected among asset owners?

The merger between Lothian and Falkirk schemes has been put on ice…again

What are the challenges facing the chancellor and are British pension schemes really are laggards compared to Canadian ones, when it comes to investing in private assets?

In the first edition of AOX we look at the early data on whether pension schemes are actually investing more in private assets or not, in response to Rachel Reeves’s requests.

In a continuation of the year’s trends, the final quarter of 2024 saw the individual local government pension schemes and LGPS pools surveyed by MandateWire targeting alternative asset classes, with a strong preference for property and infrastructure, as well as private debt.

Pension consolidators ploughed into private market assets in the final quarter of 2024 as the Royal Mail Pension Fund appointed a manager to run the UK’s first ever collective defined contribution pension scheme.

Despite a quarter-on-quarter increase in transaction volumes, the number of bulk insurance deals completed by UK corporate pension funds in Q3 2024 was below the 16 recorded in the second quarter of the year. That drop in deals coincided with greater discussion around scheme run-on.

Local government pension schemes and LGPS pools surveyed by MandateWire in the third quarter of 2024 focused on alternative portfolios, in part due to the UK government’s push to encourage the LGPS to provide UK private market funding.

Nordic university and local authority funds continued their hunt for traditional balanced managers during the second quarter of the year, while other investors in the region sought diversification in illiquid alternatives.