March 2022
28Mar

US. Kansas Employee Pension System Halts Russia Investments

Trustees who oversee the Kansas Public Employee Retirement System voted Friday to halt future investments in Russian assets amid the country's invasion of Ukraine. While some board members initially pushed for a full divestment, others said they would rather focus on the future and noted the fund’s current holdings in the country have been largely liquidated anyway, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported. Kansas has $36 million invested in Russian equities, as of Feb. 25. That accounts for about 0.14% of the pension...

March 28, 2022
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25Mar

High Pay Centre briefing: Pension saver views on the social and environmental impact of investments

By Andrew Speke & Luke Hildyard Pension savings make up a significant and growing proportion of individual wealth in the UK. The latest government figures from 2018 show that £2.6 trillion is invested in UK pensions, up from £2.3 trillion in 2015.(1) Pension savings are also one of the most commonly held forms of wealth in the UK. The percentage of adults below the State Pension age actively contributing to a private pension has increased, from 43% in 2012, to 53%...

March 25, 2022
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Over a third of people would accept lower pension savings for ethical investments
25Mar

Over a third of people would accept lower pension savings for ethical investments

More than a third (37 per cent) of people would be willing to accept some reduction in their pension savings if their investments were made more ethically, a study by the High Pay Centre and Survation has found. Read also UK. Creating a sustainable retirement plan Of those surveyed, two-thirds (66 per cent) said that they wanted their pension fund to reflect their ethical values and beliefs. Almost a third (29 per cent) considered insufficient pension savings as the biggest threat to...

March 25, 2022
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UK. Investment approach is increasingly key to pension endgames
25Mar

UK. Investment approach is increasingly key to pension endgames

Aon has said that with 2022 promising to be another active year in the UK pension risk settlement market, an increasing number of schemes are focusing on their investment approach in the bid to be ‘settlement ready’. Aon’s recently released Global Pension Risk Survey 2021/22 showed that more UK defined benefit (DB) pension schemes are now opting for buyout as their long-term target rather than just self-sufficiency. To prepare for that, schemes are ever more aware that they need to...

March 25, 2022
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UK. Pension schemes to tackle deforestation in climate push
22Mar

UK. Pension schemes to tackle deforestation in climate push

Pension schemes in the UK will be expected to do more to tackle deforestation as part of the government’s climate policies, pensions minister Guy Opperman has warned. Writing in Responsible Investor with Lord Goldsmith, minister for the Pacific and the international environment, Opperman said that because “forests and land use are a significant source of carbon emissions”, any action on climate change “will need to take deforestation into account”. “During our COP26 presidency, we are putting forests front and centre of...

March 22, 2022
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21Mar

Asia’s immense opportunities for impact investing

Investors have always known their business decisions have a social and environmental impact, but there was not enough evidence to measure it. It was more like a fringe benefit. But with increased awareness, more empirical evidence, shifting brand perceptions and the explosive emergence of social media, more investors, big and small, are paying attention to environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks and investing with the intent to make an impact. In Asia, exciting developments in the impact investing market are opening...

March 21, 2022
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16Mar

US. The Smart Way for Public Pensions to Divest from Russia

With Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine demanding a response from freedom-loving peoples everywhere, the NATO nations and other countries around the world have embarked on a wide range of economic sanctions. Some of them are far more extensive than anybody had previously imagined possible, such as the freezing of Russian central bank assets and its global interbank access, and now the U.S. oil boycott. Amid this global expression of scorn, American state and local politicians are jumping on the...

March 16, 2022
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16Mar

UK. What impact could the Russian invasion of Ukraine have on pensions?

The terrible atrocities in Ukraine have had major consequences on the world from creating a large-scale humanitarian crisis to unnerving global stock markets. But platform Interactive Investor (II) said that the latter has “implications for the value of pension pots and by extension, retirement plans”. Read also China markets in turmoil as Russia ties add to list of risks Initially, the concern among pension savers was that they did not want to be invested in Russian companies. A number of pension providers...

March 16, 2022
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UK pension schemes have little direct exposure to Russia, regulator says
15Mar

UK pension schemes have little direct exposure to Russia, regulator says

British pension schemes have very little investment in Russian securities, The Pensions Regulator's policy director said on Monday, though he added there were practical difficulties in selling them. Moscow's invasion of Ukraine has led to many firms rushing to offload Russian assets, though Western sanctions and counter-measures by Russia have made it hard to do so. "Russian stocks do make up a very small proportion of some global indices," David Fairs, The Pensions Regulator's executive director of regulatory policy, analysis and...

March 15, 2022
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Incorporating ESG into retirement strategies
15Mar

Incorporating ESG into retirement strategies

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) has come to the forefront of policymaking within the financial services sector throughout the last the decade. Indeed, many industry leaders are keen to introduce ESG into their operations. A mixture of changing laws, regulatory rules, and growing demand from investors has influenced this push in collective conscientiousness that only took hold in the mid-2000s. In 2004 then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote to 50 CEOs within major financial institutions, inviting them to join an initiative...

March 15, 2022
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