May 2020

US. Department Of Labor Simplifies Electronic Disclosure Requirements For Retirement Plans

For years, employers have struggled to satisfy Department of Labor (DOL) requirements for providing legally required notices and documents to retirement plan participants through electronic means. The DOL itself has long acknowledged that its electronic disclosure regulations were outdated and unnecessarily burdensome for employers. On May 27, the DOL published new regulations that simplify the process for providing legally required notices and documents to retirement plan participants. At a high level, these new regulations provide a safe harbor...

UK. True scale of pension scams unknown, think tank warns

The "true scale" of pension scams remains unknown as only a minority are reported and data is not collected in comparable ways across the industry, the Pensions Policy Institute has warned. A policy paper from the PPI, published yesterday (May 19), found data available about the number of scams taking place across the industry, as well as the amount lost in each scam, did not offer a comprehensive view of the true scale of the issue. It warned this...

April 2020

Athene pays $45 mln fine in first settlement of NY pension transfer probe

Athene Holding Ltd ATH.N agreed on Monday to pay a $45 million civil fine to settle charges it conducted insurance business in New York without a license, the first settlement in a probe into an industry where life insurers take over corporate pension plans. Linda Lacewell, superintendent of New York's Department of Financial Services, said Athene's unlicensed Athene Annuity & Life unit conducted 14 large pension risk transfer transactions covering tens of thousands of policy holders, and engaged in...

March 2020

PEPPs unlikely to survive after closer look by EU regulators

Money managers and consultants say that voluntary pan-European personal pension products could be dead on arrival with the watchdog European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority taking a tougher approach to its supervision. Read also ​Swedish Pensions Agency sees need for new pension savings scheme The European Commission launched PEPPs in 2019 to simplify retirement saving for self-employed and mobile workers seeking employment across the European Union. Through a portable cross-border plan design for individuals, a PEPP was developed to help...

January 2020

Nigerian Governors should publish payment details of their pensions since 1999, SERAP ask court

Nigeria’s Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has filed a lawsuit asking the Federal High Court, Abuja to order the 36 state governors in Nigeria to “publish details and breakdown of payment of pensions to each of the former governors and other ex-officials, and the names and number of ex-governors and other officials receiving pensions under their respective State pension laws between 1999 and 2019.” Read Also Nigeria’s pension industry squeezed as risk outlook for banks worsens In the suit filed...

December 2019

MySuper Product Heatmap

By APRA The MySuper Product Heatmap provides assessments of the performance of every MySuper superannuation product. The heatmap provides stakeholders with transparency on the outcomes being delivered by all trustees providing MySuper products. It is designed to lift industry practices and enhance member outcomes by publicly identifying which MySuper products are underperforming and the areas they need to improve. It uses a graduating colour scheme to provide credible, clear and comparable insights into MySuper products across three areas: investment performance, fees...

November 2019

Chile. Super de Pensiones intensifica monitoreo sobre las AFP ante impacto en rentabilidad por crisis social

La Superintendencia de Pensiones (SP) informó este miércoles que ha intensificado las actividades de monitoreo habituales que realiza sobre la gestión de las administradoras de fondos de pensiones, dada la actual coyuntura y sus efectos sobre el comportamiento del mercado financiero local. Esto ha generado un aumento en la volatilidad de los precios de los instrumentos financieros y del tipo de cambio, lo que ha impactado la rentabilidad de corto plazo de los fondos de pensiones, precisó el organismo....

UK. Ex-charity head admits defrauding disabled workers’ pension scheme

The former head of a charity faces a substantial prison sentence after admitting to defrauding a pension scheme for workers with disabilities and using the money to buy houses in England and France. Patrick McLarry, 71, took more than £250,000 from the pension scheme of Yateley Industries for the Disabled and used it to buy homes for himself and his wife and pay off a debt over a pub lease. The Pensions Regulator (TPR), which brought the prosecution, said...

Stewardship in the UK – The 2019 Draft Stewardship Code in Context

By Eva Micheler (London School of Economics - Law Department) The article interrogates the idea of creating a market for stewardship and identifies obstacles that stand in the way of such a market. In particular tax relief for pension investments deprives pension investors from an incentive to monitor investment and demand stewardship activity by their service providers. By granting tax relief the government has become a financial contributor to and a stakeholder in the financial services industry that services pensions....

April 2019

Cyber Security: 15th International Annual Conference, CNCERT 2018, Beijing, China, August 14–16, 2018, Revised Selected Papers

By Xiaochun Yun, Weiping Wen, Bo Lang, Hanbing Yan, Li Ding, Jia Li, Yu Zhou This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Annual Conference on Cyber Security, CNCERT 2018, held in Beijing, China, in August 2018. The 14 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: emergency response, mobile internet security, IoT security, cloud security, threat intelligence analysis, vulnerability, artificial intelligence security, IPv6 risk research, cybersecurity...