Author: Aaron Woolner
Defined benefit (DB) pension schemes attached to FTSE 350 companies saw their time to buy-out slip below five years for the first time since according to a gauge by consultant Barnett Waddingham. According to the Barnett Waddingham End Gauge, the average time to buyout for firms on the UK index stood at 4.7 years in Q1 2023. The index did highlight a slight blip in January when time to buy-out stretched to 5.5 years on a fall in bond yields but overall the trajectory has been downwards in the first quarter of 2023. The news carries on the positive momentum…
Aviva has struck a deal with the trustees of the Thomas Cook pension plan, for a £900 bulk annuity buy-in which will cover 12,500 pension scheme members of the UK travel agent which went bust in 2019. According to a press release the UK insurer said that as a result of the deal the majority of members were now insured to a better level than if the benefits were instead disbursed by the UK’s Pension Protection Fund (PPF) which is the provider of last resort when pension plan sponsors hit financial difficulties. Jamie Cole, Head of Bulk Purchase Origination at…
UK supermarket Safeway has fully derisked its pension scheme after completing a £1.4bn ($1.75bn) buy-in transaction with insurer Rothesay Life. The Safeway Pension Scheme is sponsored by UK retailer WM Morrisons and the latest deal means that the future pension benefits of nearly 23,00 members — comprising 7,200 pensioners and dependants, plus over 15,000 deferred members —are now fully insured. This is the second buy-in deal between the two parties and means that Rothesay, which touts itself as the UK’s largest specialist pension insurer, has derisked a total of £2.1bn of the retailer’s pension liabilities. Stephen Caine, Manchester-based director at…
The UK’s Pension Regulator warned that demand could outstrip supply in the domestic buy-out market as a combination of increased UK bond yields and higher than expected returns on returning seeking assets mean that 25% of schemes are now funded well enough to be offloaded to an insurer. The pensions watchdog published its annual funding statement on 27 April, which analysed the funding position of roughly 75% of the UK’s pension schemes and it said that the gradual rise in UK bond yields in 2022 culminating in October’s well publicised spike had radically changed funding positions in the sector. While…
More than three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, excess mortality may finally be declining in Europe, but it remains at elevated levels compared to a 2019 baseline. That is the latest observation from EuroMOMO, a pan-European mortality monitoring group which measures excess deaths among public health threats such as pandemics and seasonal influenza. In its tenth weekly 2023 bulletin, the group, which draws on data from 28 European countries and subregions, said that while the recent trend of elevated all-cause mortality was receding, the exclusion of post-2020 data means its analysis could be unreliable: in other words,…
The insurtech sector is driving significant change in the underwriting approach, fuelled by an explosion in the availability of data, the quality of data, and the technology available to analyse it.
Longevity assumptions have become more challenging to predict due to the Covid-19 pandemic