Monthly Archives: April 2017
Slow and steady – the Zurich IGC
Laurie Edmans, Zurich’s IGC chair is a laid-back man. It shows in the IGC report that is considered and unhurried. It is a very good read as a deliberation on value for money though it is rather short on action … Continue reading
Posted in pensions
Tagged edmans, pensions, Transaction costs, workplace pension, Zurich, zurich igc
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A time to be angry
I got angry yesterday… I was on a conference call with a couple of lawyers arguing about the technical difference between a “duty of care” and the need to “act in good faith”. Apparently the semantics let an employer … Continue reading
Posted in pensions
Tagged CWU, Duty of Care, John Ralfe, lawyers, pensions, Pre-pack, Royal Mail, Rutland, The Pensions Regulator
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Ombudsman 1 – Freedom 0
It would seem that Mr T (neither of the A-team or of this blog) has been sent packing by the Pensions Ombudsman. Mr T sued Standard Life’s staff pension trustees to max-up his CETV. He did so using an online … Continue reading
Payroll as distributor; can payroll win the battle of benefits?
“Payroll is our next distribution channel”, an insurer assured me last week. We were at Sage Summit, inspecting “Sage People” and the employee benefits package that was launched late last year to Sage 50 users, My mind went back to the late 1990s … Continue reading
Posted in pensions
Tagged employee benefits, Hibob, Insurer, ISA, Payroll, pensionsync, platform, Sage
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Step up or back off – don’t fudge AE for off-payroll workers!
Yesterday I asked “had HMRC solved the AE off -payroll puzzle” and a great number of people have read and opined and generally agreed that they hadn’t – and they were right. The Pensions Regulator, to its credit, has responded … Continue reading
Posted in pensions
Tagged auto-enrolment.DWP.Paul Johnson, IR35, off-payroll, Payroll, TPR
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With dementia in mind.
Why don’t we design financial services for the elderly with dementia in mind? The needs and capabilities of those in their eighties and nineties can be quite different from those in their sixties and seventies. We would not treat a twenty … Continue reading
Has HMRC solved the off-payroll AE puzzle?
One of the big auto-enrolment issues for employers is deciding who it is that works for them (and who is just an occasional contractor). The issue is generally put in the too-hard box – a dangerous thing to do … Continue reading
Keith Popplewell – Yorick’s sorry tale.
Alas poor Keith .. I knew him… When I joined Eagle Star in 1995, Keith was the star turn, an exceptional speaker, a mine of technical information and a bon viveur, Keith was a sales director’s dream. And like any showman, … Continue reading
Posted in pensions
Tagged Capita Oak, Fraud, Hamlet, keith popplewell, Popplewell, Store First, Store Pod, Yorick
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Don’t blame pensions for corporate mismanagement
The FT has come up with some excellent research on why pensions find their way into the Pension Protection Fund. It has discovered that a substantial proportion of the so-called “pension failures” over the past ten years, resulted from sale … Continue reading
Posted in Pension Freedoms, pensions, Pensions Regulator
Tagged Bernard Matthews, Financial Times, ft, Insolvency, ppf, Pre-pack, Silentnight
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Full of sound and fury…Aegon’s 2017 IGC
I hadn’t been aware that IGCs had been submitting their statements to win awards. But the first think I am taught about Aegon’s activities last year is that in 2016 the Aegon UK IGC was awarded the “Best Independent … Continue reading