What structural change means for trustees, providers and the industry

This article is the first in a short series reflecting on how the UK pensions administration market has changed over time, and what those changes mean in practice.

Each part looks at the same market through a different lens – market structure, trustee governance, administrator behaviour and industry resilience. This first piece focuses purely on how the landscape itself has evolved, setting the context for the perspectives that follow.

Introduction

This series began as a straightforward exercise: to map how the UK pensions administration market has changed over time, in preparation for our next administration survey. What emerged was something more consequential.

As we charted exits, mergers, acquisitions and new entrants across the market, it became increasingly clear these changes are not simply about firm-level strategy or competitive positioning. They reflect deeper structural shifts in how pensions administration is delivered, governed and sustained; they carry implications extending well beyond individual providers.

Over the past decade and a half, the administration market has become more consolidated, more interconnected and more operationally concentrated. Providers have exited, businesses have been reconstituted, and scale has increasingly been pursued as a means of managing cost, complexity and risk. At the same time, the capacity, people and platforms underpinning administration have become shared dependencies across the industry.

These developments raise important questions.

How is the industry responding to this new landscape?

What does consolidation signal about operational pressure and resilience?

And how should trustees think about the stability of their own administrator when change elsewhere in the market can have indirect but material effects?

This series explores those questions from multiple perspectives. It considers how consolidation has reshaped the administration market; what it means for trustee governance; how administrator behaviour can be read as a signal of underlying operational dynamics; and why administration should increasingly be viewed as a critical industry infrastructure rather than a routine outsourced service.

Throughout, we apply KGC’s operational governance lens. Rather than focusing on individual firms or short-term performance, we look at how structure, ownership and capacity influence risk, resilience and member outcomes over time. The aim is not to predict failure, but to better understand how the system now behaves, and most importantly, what good governance looks like within it.

Market Landscape

This timeline shows how the UK pensions administration and consulting market has evolved over the past 16 years from our first Administration Survey in 2009. Over this time, acquisitions have been a constant theme. But there have also been significant numbers of mergers, exits and new entrants. Firms with no structural change are shown separately at the end to keep the timeline clear (this maps firms who have participated in our Administration Surveys).

2009–2010: Early Consolidation

2012–2014: Growth & Market Exits

2016–2017: Re-branding & Strategic Withdrawals

2018–2019: Re-brands & Expansion

2020–2021: New Entrants from Exits

2022–2023: Accelerated Consolidation

2024–2025: New Market Structure

Firms With No Structural Change Over the Period

• LCP
• Hymans Robertson
• Trafalgar House
• Quantum
• Cartwright

Key Themes Emerging

• Sustained consolidation
• New entrants formed from exits
• Decline of standalone administrators
• Private equity and insurance-backed ownership models

The timeline since 2009 illustrates the market has been in a state of continuous structural change. Consolidation is not cyclical. Acquisitions, mergers, exits and reconfigurations have been a persistent feature of the UK pensions administration and consulting landscape.

Several patterns stand out:

• It seems scale has increasingly been pursued as a means of managing cost, complexity and regulatory expectation
• Where new entrants have emerged, they have overwhelmingly done so through disruption, carve-outs, exits and iteration
• Structural change, rather than organic growth, has been the primary mechanism by which the market has evolved
• The number of firms operating with unchanged ownership and operating models has steadily reduced

Overall, the market is now more concentrated, more interconnected and more dynamic, with implications extending beyond providers to governance, stability and operational risk across the industry.

The next articles explore what these structural changes mean in practice for trustee governance, administrator behaviour and industry resilience.