I’m sorry about the poor headline to this post but the Barbican was part of the experience of LCP’s DB conference yesterday. I’ll call it a collective pension conference as CDC crashed the party. It looks like LCP , the trustees and employers and one proprietor of CDC services (who had crept in quietly) could equate the DB they grew up with with the CDC that was presented as a workplace pension by Steven Taylor and Helen Draper.
I sat down to have some lunch next to a bloke who revealed himself as Graham Warren, who’d become an actuary in the 1980s with Clay (now Aon). I asked him what he thought of CDC and he said it looked like the DB he advised his clients on back in the day. He reminded me that in those days employers considered they paid a payment decided by the actuary and didn’t expect it to change. He reminded me that 90% of the funds that were building up were in growth – so extended were people’s expectations for the DB schemes to pay out.
I have to say, the average age of the trustees and employers who wore blue badges was rather older than the average age of those with orange badges of the LCP people who were hosting the occasion. My generation is generally at or past what once was thought retirement age but isn’t any more.
I could (and will) rattle on about the sessions, I didn’t mark one of them as poor on my phone (everything was done on our phones). It was fun watching Steve interview Jo Cumbo, Sam Brodbeck and Laura Purkess, three pension journalists.
Sam brought in a paper copy of the Daily Telegraph. I’m sure that people read newspapers but it reminded me that no one but my mother reads the Daily Telegraph in paper form! Sam has a grim ironic smile on his face as he pulled it out from under his chair.
I was particularly impressed by Justine Joy who early on explained how pension administrators can get it right with members (and wrong). I will remember the final keynote from Kevin Fong. It reminded me of Stuart McDonald who now is a partner at LCP but who I spent time with (yes online) during Covid-19. Kevin and Stuart are two of my Covid heroes and to be in the same room as both of them was a bit weepy for me.
I can’t say I saw everything, my working life is busy now and I had to hide round the back to do the web-calls that like many other delegates, took me over for a couple of sessions. But I do think LCP did a good job, a job that made not going to Pensions UK a little easier to take!
I filled out on an iPad a questionnaire about whether I used a car, a train or an aeroplane in getting to the event. LCP were keen to know what damage their conference was doing to the climate. I was proud to say that I had walked from and back to Blackfriars, a couple of miles! I will confess I would have taken the bus if it had been raining (the number 4 goes door to door!) if you count BNY as on my door!
As you can sense, I am full of excitement to return to work today. CDC is everywhere , even when an event is about DB. The people who know DB know CDC. The people from LCP get collective pensions and they know how pensions are important for everything from dealing with pandemics to preventing climate becoming more a crisis.
So you won’t be surprised if I finish with two words.
