Pension Managers are becoming the forgotten heroes of UK pensions and that’s not good enough.

Pension Managers are the people who have to sit at the back of the room, keep their mouths shut and see the funds of their plans eroded by markets, fees and poor decision making. Not always- but often.

Pension managers are the people who have to beat up trustees to get them to meet to take the big decision – then see the meeting cancelled again and again. Not always-but often.

They are people who  take the PMI qualifications and keep abreast of the constant changes in regulations. The people who have to fight a losing battle educating their trustees, the people who have to explain to their members why their pensions aren’t going to be what they thought they were going to be- and take the consequences.

Caught between sponsors , desperate to keep their busiensses solvent and trustees just as desperate to keep the promises made by their forebears, they are freinds of no-one. They are represented as geeks who live in the never never land of partially funded promises, the architects of everyone’s woes.

Typically, pension managers are the people left holding the parcel when the music stops. But this parcel is ticking with a timebomb concocted from an explosive mix of falling assets and rising liabilities. The bomb might be diffused but for the aparatus of regulation that so cruelly denies the manager the right to call the shots- pensions governance.

It’s time to hear it for the pensions managers and empower them. It’s time for the pension managers to fight back and assert themselves not as the architects of the pension maliase but as its  potential saviours.