September 2020

28Sep

South Africa. Pandemic accelerates changes in retirement sector

Purpose of Regulation 28 of the Pension Funds Act is to protect retirement savings. The speed at which the Covid pandemic came upon us, particularly for the employee benefits and retirement fund industry, has been likened by some to a wave of change that was necessary to propel business thinking and its applications forward. This has placed greater emphasis on the growing influence of a multitude of regulations, technologies and social ideas that were already in play before the lockdown took...

September 28, 2020
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28Sep

US. Indiana increased public pension assets despite pandemic

Indiana’s public pension funds for state and local government employees, including teachers, has apparently weathered the financial markets’ volatility during the coronavirus pandemic, new data from the state show. The General Assembly’s Pension Management Oversight Committee heard Wednesday that the Indiana Public Retirement System increased its pension assets by 2.56% to $30.6 billion during the 2020 budget year, which ran from July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020. Read More @SFChronicle

September 28, 2020
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28Sep

The Covid-19 wake-up call to buttress social investment

The temptation to cut welfare expenditures to reduce deficits inflated by the pandemic must be resisted. Barely having had time to absorb the economic and social aftershocks of the Great Recession, the world is confronted with an even more disruptive exogenous shock—the coronavirus pandemic, costing above all human lives but also causing massive dislocation. As employment opportunities for Millennials are undermined, low-wage stagnation for essential workers is reinforced and work-life balance stresses for women are intensified, the resilience of the European...

September 28, 2020
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25Sep

US. Pensions Have Been Shunning Stocks at Their Own Peril

With the Fed signaling low interest rates for the foreseeable future, pension funds weigh bigger bets on equities Read also US. Pension Buyouts a Relative Bargain, Says Mercer Pension funds and endowments have been shifting away from the U.S. stock market for years. Some are now reconsidering that decision. Read also JPMorgan-backed Brazil fintech plans to expand in U.S., Mexico Individual investors, including younger traders using apps like Robinhood, have been playing a bigger role in the market lately. They’ve been buying...

September 25, 2020
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25Sep

Kenya. Workers can now access pensions to buy house

Workers can now access up to Sh7 million or a maximum of 40 percent of their retirement savings to buy their first residential house after Treasury Secretary Ukur Yatani signed the amended regulations. Pension schemes have until September 14, 2021 to amend their rules to allow their members early to access their savings for house purchase. The law is meant to boost home ownership in a market where most people employed in the formal sector are unable to raise...

September 25, 2020
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25Sep

UK. Scam warning signs found in half of post-Lockdown pension transfers

According to XPS, the pensions consultancy firm, in July and August of this year 51% of pension transfers, equating to twenty five million pounds in pension savings, were flagged as at risk of a pension scam. The number of transfers showing at least one red flag has dramatically increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2016, only 13% of pensions’ transfers triggered a red flag. This figure rose to 33% at the end of June 2020 and then jumped considerably...

September 25, 2020
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25Sep

Greece. Funded pension plan for more workers

The Labor and Social Security Ministry is examining the idea of granting younger workers – with few years of labor in the current social security system – the option of choosing to join the new funded auxiliary pension system, the very system that new entrants in the labor market must now enter by law. The same option, per the proposals examined at the General Secretariat for Social Security, will also be offered to any groups of workers who have...

September 25, 2020
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24Sep

US. Pension Buyouts a Relative Bargain, Says Mercer

Now may be a good time for companies looking to de-risk their defined benefit (DB) pension plans to consider an annuity buyout, according to new data from consulting firm Mercer, which shows a hypothetical retiree buy-out transaction costs an estimated 97.7% of a plan’s accounting obligations. Mercer said the new data is a result of recent tweaking the company made to its US Pension Buyout Index, which tracks the relationship between the accounting liability for a defined benefit plan...

September 24, 2020
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24Sep

Ghana: Press highlights plight of pensioners, removal of 7,000 ‘ghost’ names from govt’s payroll

The call on the government to take liability for the shortage in the payment of lump sums to pensioners and the removal of 7,000 ‘ghost’ names from the government’s payroll are some of the trending stories in the Ghanaian press on Wednesday. The Graphic reports that the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has called on the government to take liability for the shortage in the payment of lump sums to pensioners who started retiring from this year under the new...

September 24, 2020
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24Sep

UK. Aon warns longevity risk has not gone away with COVID-19 deaths

Insurance and reinsurance broker and risk advisory Aon has warned today that re/insurers and pension funds need to avoid over-reacting to how inclusion of COVID-19 deaths changes recognised mortality models, saying that “longevity risk has not gone away.” Once excess deaths are added into the mortality models for the United Kingdom it may produce an unrealistic fall in life expectancy, Aon warns. Insurance and reinsurance companies, as well as pension schemes and funds, factor life expectancy into their calculations...

September 24, 2020
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