Most of the time I have little sympathy for the de-risking brigade who seem to think it their right to walk all over schemes trying to run on. Now one has got away – a big one – and there may be more schemes that will do what Stagecoach and Aberdeen have done.
But this time, I know the de-risker and I like Andrew Smith, even if he is too clever by a half! Here are his questions he thought up on his way to work (yes, really – it’s what actuaries do when travelling on a Monday morning!)
I’m glad Andy Smith has given me some questions to ask John Hamilton at our coffee morning!
John and I part at the end of an eventful February day!
In February of this year, I went to Melton Mowbray to hear John Hamilton speak to a PLSA East Midlands meeting about what needed to happen in this country.
This is a photograph of us late in the day waving from opposite platforms. But it seemed we were on the same journey metaphorically though not literally! He ended north of Perth, I ended in the City of London.
John will be speaking tomorrow about what he has done this year to make things grow at Stagecoach and wider!
He will be presenting to our Pension PlayPen coffee morning crowd and you could be one of them. We have a record attendance to break and I suspect John will come close!
Coffee Morning- In conversation with Stagecoach’s John Hamilton CPD included
Type – Online
When – Tuesday 16th December 2025 at 10:30am
You are cordially invited to attend our next Coffee Morning event.
Following the announcement of Stagecoach’s deal with ABRDN we are delighted that Stagecoach’s Pension Scheme Chair and Group Pensions Manager, John Hamilton, will be joining us for an “Audience with”.
As a welcome addition to Punter Southall’s Richard Jones’s DB Surplus session at our last event this will be a great opportunity to ask John about the deal, how it will work, the view and role of the Pensions Regulator and the risks for the Scheme Trustees? Also how will it affect Scheme members and what did the unions think?.
With over £1.2Bn in assets the Stagecoach deal appears to be an ingenious way of working with the sponsor to protect members and reduce sponsor risk. What are the risks for ABRDN?
They are an update of the set he presented to us at Melton Mowbray. How grateful (he to speak and me to listen) we are for Bob Compton who invited us! If you want your own copy, you can download the slides on this link
I have posted the link to the coffee morning meeting above and below and hope and here
I hope that we have a way forward for schemes like Stagecoach who want to run on and to do so with either capital backing or the backing of a financially confident employer like Aberdeen.
The call for John to come to this meeting on Tuesday 16th, was made at Tuesday’s meeting where Richard Jones was speaking. I had no doubt that John Hamilton would seize the opportunity if he could. He could!
I want John Hamilton to explain how he wants – as ongoing Chair of Trustees of Stagecoach – to embrace “innovation, growth”, in finding his purpose.
There are questions asked in this week’s coffee morning which we have shared with John Hamilton with this video. Go to minute 2o minutes for the section where Richard turns to Stagecoach and those at the Coffee Morning ask questions that John will be able to address next Tuesday.
We hope you enjoy it; the debate is an historic document marking the progress we are making.
Yes videos as well as slide decks can be deemed documents!
I am sorry I made no contribution, other than to announce this “document” at the end. I spent a little time with my neurologist who was evaluating my little grey matter.
The work with Aberdeen is some of the most interesting in the DB “endgame” and I hope that before long we can get a spokesperson from Aberdeen to join us. We have one more slot this year.
If you find yourself with something to say at the end of the day, drop me a line at henry@agewage.com or put a comment on the blog. I will pass things on to Steve Goddard who has the keys to the webtool!
To end, here’s tomorrow’s (Tuesday’s) link to hear John and talk with him
Richard you are right. No turning back now on pension dashboards!
It is of course more than pension dashboard’s consistency that is in question. If the projections for the pension we are going to get for pensions expected from DC pots under the FCA are different from the pensions expected from a TPR pot , what will the saver make of that? What will anyone reads a paper or googles “how do they work out the pension that I’ll get?”
That paper’ consultation finished on the 27th February this year and the closure of work on the dashboard closes on the end of October next year.
The FCA should go live some time after next October, in 2027 we hope very much.
One thing that’s going on now is that consumers who are doing testing – good news on design I hear from Richard and good news from the one person I know who has tried the dashboard on his stuff – Chris Currie. But is this enough testing if “consumers” find that some pots are rolling under TPR SMPI regs and under FCA COBS 13 roll up rules.
I won’t go into the detail but it depends if your pot is contract or trust based and how many consumers know that, how many care and how are they going to feel if they are told they are giving them different results to each others?
Richard has made it clear where the confusion is likely to arise
It’s not the fact that an anomaly exists (they always arise) but that the FCA think this is too much of a problem to tackle in the minimum ten months and more likely the much longer.
I guess there is a political angle behind this , depending on whether you think pensions are wealth or retirement income, whether you are Treasury of DWP , whether you are FCA or DWP. But this is where Government needs to be big and make a ruling. We simply can’t have two sets of rules governing what we are told we can expect, rules that are different and most like give us different rules.
Comparisons matter to people; simple comparisons that measure VFM in a fair way; telling them what they can expect, in a way they can trust.
It noted that, in January this year, it had set out almost 50 pro-growth measures – adding it had now delivered “the vast majority of these and more”.
It said it aimed to go further next year and set out its aims for 2026 – including plans to further unlock capital investment and liquidity, accelerate digital innovation, reduce regulatory burden and make it easier for firms to start up and grow.
Among the measures it plans for 2026, the FCA said it would reform rules for venture capital and alternative investment fund managers and consult on the pension charge cap so consumers are not disincentivised from investments due to higher performance fees.
There has been a lot of hysteria about the cost of hedge and other funds that depend on performance fees as if the price paid – if things deliver , should not be paid.
This has been the line for some time from Jo Cumbo and it was the line she took from an FT article on Rathi’s letter to Starmer
Again, the article is about growth and the restrictions on the annual management charge are not what the FT are reporting the FCA as saying in the main part.
We are moving from retail to institutional investment of our DC pension plans , because of the reforms proposed in the Pension Schemes Bill and the CDC legislation. Necessarily , the FCA are reacting to a new climate where nailing down charges to the floor does not become the due diligence on whole of life investment.
It is hard to see how we can focus on the 49 items to do with growing our pension funds over time if we so over-emphasise the caps on charges that so restrict it.
I think back to my late founder of AgeWage and ClearGlass, Chris Sier.
His determination of the impact of charges on pure growth was much higher than the charge cap. He praise pools like Border and Coast for transparency and for delivering value for the money, even when the costs were high.
Necessarily, when counting all the costs that an expert will consider in making a direct investment or into a fund, expensive obstacles have to be balanced against opportunity. It is the nature of long term investment that these costs are spread over time to make a business case for making it and necessarily the charges may be accounted much higher in the early years than any charge can allow.
By comparison, the funds that were set up within GPPs and the emerging master trusts from 2012 took millions of people into investment for the first time and have worked.
My blog asked whether we want both Lewis and Rathi and I have concluded we want both. That is not me being patronising to beginners or me lauding the experts but if we cannot move beyond vanilla pooled passive funds , then we have no ambition.
Steve Webb’s charge cap in 2014 was right and it has taken us a long way, but we must go further down the line. Here’s the FCA (not Johnny Cash).
I said they were better at doing it in “London” as I thought “LinkedIn” was a bit parochial but I ended up writing about the LinkedIn end of social media!
Today there’s an article by Isabel Berwick about whether women are being discriminated against by LinkedIn algorithms making it easier to get “impressions” if you’re a man than a woman.
My best-performing LinkedIn content in 2025? A video I shot on the phone while hiding in a ladies’ bathroom at the office, feeling very sorry for myself: 150,000 views.
Here’s the post, see the gender split if you click through to comments.
This is exactly what I picked up from my , and Richard Smith’s young female colleagues.
Isabel Berwick’s post may be a reaction to an inherent irritation with linked in that women feel when they look at how hard it is to get noticed on the LinkedIn. She writes that women are given a lack of attention compared with men.
there are now lots of posts from women who have been pretending to be men. And who found that the switch made them incredibly popular.
There is a lot going on among women
women (and some men) have been driven to the gender-swap stunt by a suspicion that the LinkedIn algorithm has changed in recent months, causing it to “suppress” posts from women — and from women of colour, in particular.
It seems that being a man, in other words, gets you seen by a lot more people.
The experiment started when Megan Cornish, a strategist for mental health brands, saw women reporting dramatic drops in the numbers of followers seeing their posts. She became a man on LinkedIn and asked AI to rewrite both her career summary and old posts that hadn’t performed well, using “more male, ‘agentic’ language”.
Bingo. Views went up 400 per cent.
There is a lawyer’s statement on Isabel’s article but I’m sure that nowhere in LinkedIn land is there a group of misogynists doing women down.
In a statement, LinkedIn said that “our algorithms do not use gender as a ranking signal, and changing gender on your profile does not affect how your content appears in search or feed. We regularly evaluate our systems across millions of posts, including checks for gender-related disparities, alongside ongoing reviews and member feedback.”
The fact is that men like me (my age, my sex) do rather well out of Linked in and I fear women don’t!
Were you just on LinkedIn – now on this blog enough to get to the bottom and not just making an “impression”? I really don’t do fact checks on who reads my blog let alone of the 25,000 on blogs, 30,000 followers and linked in to me are in the least bit bothered by me.
I don’t get many legal threats (none in the last year) and I haven’t pissed off many people (except Nico and Darren but hey they are men!).
It would be interesting if you want to comment – either on linked in or on my blog. I wonder of my anonymous commentors with aliases – are indeed men!
Stats below are for the last year , showing linked in is my favoured source of clicks onto this blog
Colin Haines is one of Britain’s brightest independent pension actuaries
He cares about pensioners and those at work. So should we. Thanks Colin.
Employers can help Britain’s workplace’s Britain working. A working adult is also a saving employee. Eventually he or she will be a pensioner and that matters to employers if they’re thinking “pensions” not just “pots”!
I hope that this blog will indicate to Colin my interest in understanding the health of company workforces. It is important that smaller companies know their “case evidence.
It ‘s important not just for healthcare but for pensions , in an era where we are moving into a pension system of unconnected multiple-employer CDC scheme ( UMES ). Employers would do well to know the kind of company they are and the kind of companies they would be unconnected to other than in a single pool of savers and pensions who will die on average differently (one group to another).
If you are running a CDC UMES whether whole of life or from retirement, the type of workers you are taking on decides the mortality factors you are using to decide how long your pensioner is going to live. Do not suppose that Royal Mail’s actuaries don’t have a pretty good idea. Of course the risk of living longer is not the employer’s limit, but knowing what is known should be a factor. I would hope that mortality factors used by CDC actuaries will be available to those doing due diligence on the CDC scheme they are going to use.
Knowing how “well” staff are ; knowing how long they’ll live ; is important to employers and those providing protection against surprises (good and bad!).
It strikes me that basic needs of pensions are currently missing. Valuation of private assets is poor, we require estimates based on Internal Rates of Returns offered usually by funds. We have little liquidity, with no secondary market to give us an immediate price and if taken – money. We cannot see how our investments are getting on.
Read the brochure and you can see that that not only is shipping a valuable area of investment (think Merchant of Venice for risks and rewards) but that by tokenising the assets you are buying into (ships) , you have an immutable record of what has happened and what is earned – via the blockchain.
Investors will buy a Ship Co-Owner investment contract (SCO).
I hope you can understand from this that an SCO is no more than a way for investors to know what is happening with its investment (think Merchant of Venice when the merchants waited till the boat entered the Venetian lagoon (or didn’t).
Transparency – what the investor will pay – how documented
What this means for the wider private markets
This may sound extravagant a claim but read the FCA on tokenisation and read about the Smart/Mobius/Octopus/Ctrl-Act “TRAC” venture to see how it becomes something as close to home as a UK DC workplace pension.
The Pitch from this firm – “Arrow” – to investors considering
This is high over my head but I can remember the Merchant of Venice!
In Venice, a merchant named Antonio worries that his ships are overdue. All the problems of the play spring from his lack of information and poor decisions he takes that lead him to despair.
I have been through the brochure above in full , seen the risks that buying into “maritime assets” and realise that this cannot be an investment for a retail investment on his or her own. But it is not an investment that pensioners cannot benefit from , if due diligence can be done on the ships invested in and their management.
Antonio and the CIO of a pension fund are in the same position, managing portfolios for gain and with risk and growth balanced in decision making.
What seems evident is that tokenisation is the key to this
Tokenization is the process of creating a digital representation of a real thing. Tokenization can also be used to protect sensitive data or to efficiently process large amounts of data.
These are two challenges faced by investment managers…so why now? McKinsey goes on
After a couple false starts, tokenized financial assets are moving from pilot to at-scale development. McKinsey analysis indicates that tokenized market capitalization could reach around $2 trillion by 2030 (excluding cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and stablecoins like Tether).
Specifically, we expect that organizations working with certain asset classes will be the quickest adopters; these include cash and deposits, bonds and exchange-traded notes, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, as well as loans and securitization. Larry Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, said in January 2024:
“We believe the next step going forward will be the tokenization of financial assets, and that means every stock, every bond … will be on one general ledger.”
I am not sure what this little video or a badly played under-sized violin is saying? Is it ironic or simply inept?
Gallagher is an insurance brokerage rather like Aon and Marsh Mac and Howden and Willis Towers Watson which is necessarily facing the insurance industry and annuities rather than asset management and pensions.
So when a pension consultancy falls, I would expect tiny violins to be played by the insurance brokers for that falling pension consultancy. In this case, where First Actuarial has just been snapped up, Gallagher has recently bought out Redington, Buck and AHC . Gallagher has captured a lot of actuaries and they’re now pointing not at pensions but insurance.
I am a sad fellow and I would like a lament for what has been lost, a fine partnership.
Instead, we get a woo-hoo from Mark Williams which suggests we should be “woo-hoo-ing” with him. First Actuarial were a genuinely independent pension consultancy , it is no more.
PWC and the other privately owned consultancies have a lot of actuaries but I don’t think you judge them by the number of actuaries (the most) but by the range of services they advise on. They are a corporate pension adviser.
While I have a lot of goodwill to LCP and to teams all over the pension consultancies, I can only point now at Hymans Robertson as a genuine actuarial-led pension partnership that is not pointing towards insurance.
So I am not playing an ill-sized violin ineptly or ironically. I am genuinely sorry for First Actuarial’s staff (who own some of my company’s equity). Their Founders are of an age to want to be out. The money is on the side of the American insurance brokers and First Actuarial are part of one. The market must now pay the same prices and get the same services as they would if they were with almost anybody else.
The homogenisation of the consultancy marketing advising DB pension funds and their sponsors is as small as that violin and sadly sounding as inept and ironic.
Diversity is reducing, there is precious little independent thinking. First Actuarial should get an ode of joy for what it has done in twenty years. We must play a proper tune and I mean by those who believe in pensions not annuities.
Which is why sponsors who are keen to have pension schemes and not be a feeder to Bermudan insurance companies (and their likes) had better put two fingers up to the noise of the American owned insurance brokers with a lot of actuaries but not a lot of interest in carrying on DB pensions.
There is of course an alternative. There are enough independent pension consultants/actuaries in LCP , and an unpurchased firm in Hymans Robertson to suggest that we can hope to see pension mutuals continuing to sprout. These will have to be driven primarily by sponsors of pensions and by organisations that can bring smaller employers together.
That kind of organisation may attract the right kind of minds who have genuinely independent thinking both as purchasers of actuarial consultancy services and to provide them. Of course I am thinking of the future of pensions into the 22nd century as well as the bulk of the 21st because, believe it or not, some of the people coming into our workforces now will be alive and needing retirement income in 2100 and beyond.
So a big an imperious sound from this blog to drown out the inept or ironic sound coming from those who would drown out the beautiful sound with a tiny violin.
This week I went to the Royal London Hospital as people have been noticing times when I cannot get words out in a simple way.
I was told by my neurological consultant that I was likely suffering something called Migraine Aphasia. Aphasia is a disorder that affects how you communicate. It can impact your speech, as well as the way you write and understand both spoken and written language.
To me it stops me not just speaking with people but getting words out on my keyboard. I can put words down on this blog but I cannot make sense of how they wind into sentences. Some people who follow me digitally will notice that there was nothing on this blog before 10am, that’s because I could not put words together. There may be oddities on the blogs since then.
A year ago I was in the neurological ward of Kings College Hospital recovering from a double brain haemorrhage (left and right).
I have been getting better in many ways but I continue to have these migraines. I am not sure if there will be any improvement.
Those who’ve seen me struggling will know that I smile my way through it. I know now it will go away as it has this morning. But it’s a freaky thing to happen.
Here’s an article by Paula Dumas
One of the most noticeable migraine symptoms is what we call the migraine babble: The words just don’t come out the way you intended. Migraine speech problems can be attributed to migraine aura, and, luckily, they are temporary.
Doctors refer to this symptom as “transient aphasia,” a temporary communication disorder characterized by word-finding difficulty.
Aphasia impairs one’s ability to process language, both in written and spoken words. People with transient aphasia have trouble putting words together to speak or write, understanding what others are saying, and comprehending what they read. When they try to speak, words come out garbled and unintelligible.
Experiencing migraine aphasia can range from frustrating to frightening — here’s what you need to know.
What Causes Transient Aphasia?
Aphasia usually results from damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. Many stroke victims suffer aphasia causing partial or complete loss of speech and difficulty with word-finding.
Certain types of migraine — specifically migraine with aura — can involve aphasia symptoms. Seizures or transient ischemic attacks (TIA) can also cause temporary aphasia that typically resolves with time.
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Trouble with speech, mainly word-finding difficulty, is also a possible side effect of (topiramate) Topamax, a medication frequently used for migraine prevention, according to Migraine Again’s network site Everyday Health.
Aphasia Is a Migraine Symptom That Affects Language
Why does it happen? Amaal Starling, MD, neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, explains that when someone is having a migraine attack:
They often feel like they aren’t thinking clearly. There’s some slowing of cognition.
Other people may experience speech symptoms, a symptom calledaphasia: difficulty understanding language or expressing words.
Some people may have dysarthria: slurred, garbled speech.
Migraine advocate Cannon Tekstar Hodge describes how dysarthria disrupts her speech with a “sharp, staccato stutter” in her battle with an extremely rare form of migraine, migraine with unilateral motor symptoms (MUMS.)
Never ignore migraine speech problems. If you’re experiencing speech issues or trouble word-finding for the first time, contact a doctor or headache specialist to make sure it’s not related to a more serious issue, such as a stroke.
If your friends tell you that you’re talking gibberish, or if you find you can’t get the words out, it could very well be a migraine symptom, regardless of whether you’re having head pain at that time.
How the Community Feels About Aphasia During Migraine Attacks
We asked our community how they feel about the inability to express themselves during a migraine attack. Here’s what they had to say:
It’s a horrible feeling wanting to speak and the words don’t come or they’re all slurred. —Lauren W.
Yes, very scary. I speak two languages and during an attack I cannot put words together. I usually point to things to communicate like a cavewoman! —Sandra R.
I often slur. I know what I’m trying to say, but I can’t get it out. —Dawn R.
Additionally, read Julie H.’s Migraine Journey, where she describes experiencing transient aphasia while reading to her daughter.
Blimey, I am so pleased to read this article and find the liberty this young lady being promoted by a boss at her company.
I think back when I was in my twenties and we had no enterprise opportunities of this for anyone and if there was an opportunity it was sorted by men.
My friends from Romi down are female , dynamic , young and using technology as I can’t!
Here’s the people congratulating Ariane starting the boss shouting out Anne Marie as she starts on her own. Since when have men had that generosity!
Lisa and Clare went out for some lunch a few weeks back. I realised that I was out of my depth!
Women helping themselves
Here’s a friend of mine speaking about a recent approach; same thing
Us boys are out of our depth!
Our generation , do not have the extraordinary equality between genders. Dare I say it? Well ;- us guys don’t have the capacity to use social media as younger women do because in many ways we aren’t quite that smart!
How good it is to see a woman setting out on her own , as young as Ariane Marie. Good luck you , it is your sex and your generation that has made a better society than the one’s I grew up in London in business in the 1980s.
As Martin Lewis discussed with us last Tuesday, many people have no comprehension of investment and for them a simple guard rail that allows them to stay with pooled funds with charges well below 0.75% is obvious. 
