DC Accumulation Strategies

Andy enjoys a portfolio career as a trustee and Non Executive Director. In the world of pensions, he is Chair of Trustees of the Nat West DC Plan, a NED at Capital Cranfield, and a member of the Investment and Funding Committee of the Lloyds Banking Group DB pension schemes.

Until 2019, Andy spent 30 years at Aon as an actuarial and Investment consultant, was a member of the Global Retirement & Investment Leadership and CEO of Aon Hewitt Ltd in the UK. He also sat on the Aon Global Operating Committee.

In his spare time, Andy enjoys skiing and scrambling with his family and has recently passed his private pilots license.  He is also looking forward to more success supporting Wales on the rugby pitch.

The Rt. Hon Stephen Timms is currently the Member of Parliament for East Ham. He is also the Labour Party’s Faith Envoy. He was the Shadow Minister for Employment from 2010 until September 2015 and currently Chairs the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee.

Stephen entered Parliament in 1994 and held a number of ministerial posts under the previous Labour Government including Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Before entering Parliament, Stephen worked in the telecommunications industry for fifteen years, first for Logica and then for Ovum. He managed Ovum’s telecommunications reports business until his election in 1994.

Stephen is also a member of the Ramblers Association and the former Chair of Christians on the Left.

Joe is a communication specialist, a best-selling author and screenwriter. He has developed communication strategies for pension schemes, investment firms, insurers and financial institutions, big and small. His work at Quietroom is all about making complicated or difficult messages more meaningful to more people. He specialises in engaging a reluctant audience and using the tools of a storyteller to bring unloved subjects to life. 

Dianne is an accredited, professional pension trustee and a Director at Independent Trustee Services Ltd (ITS). She joined ITS in 2015, specialising in defined contribution (DC) scheme appointments.

Her trustee experience spans DC master trusts, single employer schemes and Independent Governance Committees. Dianne applies over 30 years’ experience in investment management and member communications to the good governance of members’ pension benefits.

Andy has an established track record of driving DC strategies to meet the requirements of the UK’s largest employers. Prior to his current role of Master Trust Strategic Development Director at Aegon UK Investing, Andy was at Standard Life Group for over 25 years working within the Group’s DC Corporate business and the Asset Management arm as an Investment Director.

Latterly, he was Head of Market Strategy at Atlas Master Trust. He is a regular pension trade press contributor and presenter at pension and investment conferences in the UK and overseas and former chair of the DC Investment Forum.

Mark is a Trustee and former Chief Investment Officer of the Nationwide Pension Fund, where he had responsibility for the performance and implementation of the asset allocation strategies agreed with the fund investment advisors.

Previously, he led the establishment of Nationwide’s Covered Bond programme and its Silverstone RMBS Master Trust funding vehicle. In addition, Mark has securitised UK Student Loans and a synthetic corporate bond structure along with structured transaction and investment in various ABS instruments. Past experience also includes leading the origination and structuring of social housing, PFI and commercial real estate debt transactions.

Tom is Director of Public Affairs at the lang cat, an Edinburgh based financial services consultancy. Tom has worked in financial services since 1986, for insurance companies and a financial advice business.

For 19 years, until 2020, he was the Pensions and Retirement Spokesman and Public Policy Expert for Hargreaves Lansdown, the FTSE 100 investment platform. Tom has been a frequent contributor to print and broadcast media coverage of financial planning and retirement issues.

Ian is the Interim Head of Investment Strategy at the Lloyds Banking Group pension schemes. Until recently, he was Chief Investment Officer at Lloyds, having joined from Aviva, where he carried out a similar role. Prior to that, he was the CIO of the PPF and is also a member of the Actuarial Profession’s Finance and Investment Board, while also being Chairman of EPFIF’s Pension Fund Investment Advisory Committee.

Danny is Cushon’s Head of Workplace Savings. Danny leads Cushon’s pension strategy and intermediary relations team.

Prior to joining Cushon, Danny has worked as a DC consultant at KPMG, Willis Towers Watson and Capita advising some of the UK’s largest companies on pension and financial wellbeing strategies.

Jennifer is a portfolio specialist in the Multi-Asset team at Ninety One, responsible for product management across the range of Multi-Asset Growth, Income and Thematic Equity strategies. In this role Jennifer represents the Multi-Asset team and its strategies with clients, as well as helping to develop solutions for clients and dealing with complex queries.

Before joining Ninety One, she was a senior consultant at Aon in their investment fiduciary management team. Her key responsibilities were to represent Aon’s capabilities with clients and prospects, with an additional focus on fixed income products. Prior to this Jennifer spent three years in the actuarial retirement consulting practice also at Aon.

Jennifer holds a First Class Masters Degree in Chemistry from the University of Liverpool and a Masters Degree in Actuarial Science from Imperial College London. Jennifer is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (FIA) and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary (CERA).

David joined Mobius this year and is responsible for the setting and driving of Mobius’ DC and wider firms proposition, aligning with the vision of the Board and Mobius investors. David is also responsible for service delivery and client relationship management relating to DC clients and strategic partners.

David was Head of Investment Delivery and Strategic Partnerships for 12 years at AllianceBernstein; responsible for investment oversight of their multi asset business in EMEA, focusing on retirement solutions for DC pension schemes. With 30 years experience in the asset management and pensions sector, David has worked at Rothschild Asset Management and Sun Life of Canada Asset Management in business analyst and operational roles.

Prior to AllianceBernstein, David held positions in corporate pensions sector, fulfilling head of DC operations at Xafinity and Aon Consulting, and commercial and client responsibilities for Capita Hartshead. David believes that there is no one solution to achieving better member outcomes, but that it happens as a result of an honest and professional eco system working together, wanting to do the right thing for savers.

Julius spent his executive career working with DC pensions in both the insurance and asset management industries. In his subsequent non-executive career, Julius has held a number of independent pension and investment governance roles. He was one of the founding trustee directors of NEST Corporation and chaired both its investment and risk committees.

Eve has 22 years of experience in the UK pension industry, working in pension consulting at Mercer prior to joining Nest in 2019. Eve is currently Acting Director of Customer Engagement, leading the Directorate responsible for understanding Nest’s broad range of customer groups and ensuring that the scheme delivers to their needs.

Eve’s previous time in consulting gave her the opportunity to lead in a number of different areas, including business change and technology projects, operational management, financial wellbeing, proposition development and ultimately leading Mercer’s UK DC consulting team.

In 2017, Eve co-authored Mercer’s “The Gender Pension Gap – From Awareness to Action” whitepaper which outlined the status of the pension gender gap in Europe and detailed what industry, employers and governments could do to create change.

When not working, Eve is taxi driver to two children, a keen singer and a serial house renovator.

Back in 2003, my business partner, Vincent Franklin and I were working in a marketing agency, selling stuff that people wanted, like beach holidays and fancy trainers. But then we read about the ‘pensions time bomb’. We were fascinated. How had this happened and why wasn’t it being talked about in a way that was helpful to ordinary people?

We’d stumbled on our mission – to cajole the pensions industry into making long-term savings more meaningful to more people. To challenge the way the industry saw their customers – people who’d never get their heads around the complexities of pensions.

We’re still some way off where we need to be when it comes to helping people make better decisions about how they’re going to live after they stop working. But old barriers are falling and things are beginning to come together; digital first, the application of behavioural science, the binning of jargon, emotional connection, encouraging a two-way dialogue, apps that connect pension investment with the money in your wallet, providers with a consumer brand mentality and the realisation that pension money isn’t in a vault in Switzerland but is invested in the real world people care about.

Sophia joined XPS Pensions Group in June 2020 to lead their DC business, helping clients deliver top class DC services to their members. Prior to that, she led Aon’s DC Consulting business. Sophia has over 24 years’ experience in the UK pensions industry and advises corporates and trustees on a range of DC pension solutions, developing and delivering DC strategies that optimise scheme design, ensuring effective governance and improving member outcomes. She is a well-known industry and media commentator on DC market developments and feels passionately that we must tackle short-term financial resilience as well as deliver better long-term post-retirement products, if we’re going to help today’s workforce to retire with the security and lifestyle they want; she is regularly quoted in the press and presents on DC issues at industry events.

Louise is a policy principal in TPR’s Regulatory Policy Directorate. She joined the Regulator in 2007, and has worked in both policy and operational teams, across issues relating to both DB and DC.  

 Louise leads the team responsible for developing policy relating to the Governance and Administration of trust-based pension schemes. This includes the ‘Future of Trusteeship’ initiative, Pensions Dashboards and the regulation of DC schemes.  

 Before joining the Regulator, Louise spent 12 years working in the pensions industry in technical roles ranging across the pension mis-selling review, third party pension administration, and TPAS (The Pensions Advisory Service). 

Henry is the founder of both AgeWage and the Pension PlayPen, designed to map the pensions genome and ensure everyone gets data driven information on value for money. He has worked most of his career in pensions, most recently as a Director of First Actuarial, and notably at Eagle Star and Zurich Assurance.

He is a well known blogger on all pensions-related issues at henrytapper.com.

In addition to his role at M&G, Mark is a Member of the Independent Governance Committee at Zurich Insurance; Executive Chairman of the UBS (UK) Pension & Life Assurance Scheme Investment Committee; and a Member of the Investment & Funding and DC Committees at Lloyds Banking Group Pensions. He was previously the Chief Investment Officer of HSBC Bank Pension Trust (UK) Limited, who he joined in 2011.

Prior to this, he held a number of senior investment roles at Prudential/M&G. These included UK Equity Fund Manager, Head of Equity Research, Director of Collective Investments, and Investment & Strategy Director for Prudential Europe. 

Janette is one of the founding directors of Ignition House. She has more than twenty years research experience and brings a broad range of research and consultancy skills and experience from her previous roles. Janette is responsible for new business development and is Head of the Financial Services and Public Sector Practices. She started her career as an economist at the Department of Work and Pensions, where she spent five years advising ministers and policy makers. This gave her a solid grounding in research skills and an understanding of the public sector.

She moved to be Chief Economist at the Association of British Insurers to build detailed knowledge of the insurance sector. From there, she led a team of thirty analysts covering all aspects of Financial Services as Head of UK Financial Services Research at McKinsey and Company. She was part of a pan-European team, which gave an international flavour to her research skill set. She also worked in a small team for a year to develop and implement McKinsey’s knowledge management strategy.

As Director of the Financial and Public Sector Practice at IQ Research, she built a solid practice of bespoke and syndicated work for financial services companies, economics consultancies, regulators, and trade associations. Janette is a well-known industry expert on the life and pensions sector, and often writes articles for the trade press.

Aegon are one of the largest providers of workplace pensions in the UK, supporting over 10,000 employer schemes and managing the savings of over 920,000 members*.  

From contract-based to trust-based defined contribution (DC) schemes, investment-only services to master trust arrangements. 

We aim to provide a highly comprehensive range of workplace solutions. 

*As at July 2021 

Quietroom are here to make pensions more meaningful to more people.

We’re writers and strategists, supported by designers, developers and filmmakers. We’re on a mission to make pensions more meaningful to more people. Thanks to our work, people are better informed and better off. That’s exciting.

Pensions affect everybody’s future. But they’re hard to understand and even harder to love. They’re invisible and intangible – until you need them.            

That’s a problem for pension savers, because we can only make choices that leave us better off in the long-term if we understand those choices and what they mean for us. It’s a problem for pension providers, because we can’t reach the people whose lives we’re trying to improve if we talk in a way that makes them switch off. And it’s a problem for society too. We’ll only tackle big issues like the ageing population, the savings gap and the transition to a low-carbon economy if everyone feels confident asking questions, challenging assumptions and contributing ideas.

That’s why we approach pensions communication in the way we do. We want to encourage as many people as possible to join the conversation – so everyone can make better decisions about their future.