By Ruth Wishart YOU remember good old Iain. Chap who used to be leader of the Conservative Party till they found out he was pretty useless at it, so they got rid of him. The bloke who was put in charge of benefit reform and took years to come up with that model of equity and clarity: Universal Credit. Which turned out to create more anomalies than it was set up to solve. So they got rid of him....
The proportion of elderly people who are living in severe poverty in the UK is five times what it was in 1986, the Pension Reforms and Old Age Inequalities in Europe report found. The rate has shot up from 0.9 percent to around 5 percent. Professor Bernhard Ebbinghaus of the University of Oxford blamed state pensions for the rise in poverty among people aged 65 and over. He told The Observer: “The UK is a good example of the...
A new report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), fronted by former Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith, has proposed accelerating plans to increase the state pension age in order to boost the UK economy. The influential think-tank has hit out at the financial burden of the ageing population on public funds, and insists thousands of people aged 50 to 64-years-old are deemed “economically inactive”. One pensioners' group claimed the decision would mean more people would die before they reached...
On August 9th in a blog post, the deputy director of digital payments and banking systems at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) made a statement that the DWP was looking for ways to revamp its payment systems in order to make them better adapted to the current economic situation in the country. Richard LAYCOCK said that implementing the blockchain would bring great benefit to the speed, efficiency, and cost of conducting millions of transactions every single day...
Britain’s biggest companies, investors and pension funds must come clean to investors on the financial risks they face due to the climate crisis, MPs have said. The environmental audit committee (EAC) has called for the City of London to face mandatory climate reporting within the next three years to avoid jeopardising hundreds of billions of pounds worth of pension savings. The cross-party committee of MPs criticised ministers for failing to take specific steps to drive forward climate disclosure plans,...
Legal & General has jumped the gun on the government’s plans for a state-backed service enabling people to see all their pension entitlements on one web page and snapped up a private financial technology company attempting to provide a dashboard service. The insurer said it had bought the company behind My Future Now for an undisclosed sum and would be making its service available to customers and financial advisers. My Future Now was founded in Poole, Dorset, and enables...
Back in 2016, there was a referendum that caused Brexit, which has since been affecting all spheres of British life. Would Brexit’s effects be positive or negative for the fintech industry in the United Kingdom? We asked experts from the London Fintech Week, the U.K. in a Changing Europe, the University of Nottingham and more. Meanwhile — and this should be underlined — a lot of experts declined to give comments on such a politically sensitive topic. While the...
The UK’s Fintech (Financial Technology) sector is on the rise – despite Brexit uncertainty investors have put $16bn into the UK fintech market in just the first-half of 2018, a level of investment surpassing that of both the US and China. The UK remains the main hub in Europe for financial technology start-ups, providing over 60,000 jobs. Cloud Computing & The Foundations of Banking: In a highly competitive market, high-street banks are in pursuit of digital transformation with business...
The pension pots of five million savers are at risk from crooks, new research reveals. Figures from the Pensions Regulator and the Financial Conduct Authority showed 42% of working Brits aged 45-65 would fall for at least one scam tactic that's already out there. And even the cleverest savers are at risk thanks to "blind spots" exploited by criminals. Psychologist Honey Langcaster-James explained: “Most people are confident in their ability to avoid being scammed. We tend to assume that...
The Prudential Insurance Company of America (PICA), a subsidiary of Prudential Financial, Inc., has completed a longevity swap transaction with the HSBC Bank (UK) Pension Scheme. The longevity swap is the second largest transaction ever completed for a UK pension scheme, and concerns the longevity risk in relation to c£7 billion of pensioner liabilities. The new longevity insurance policy forms part of the Pension Scheme’s investment portfolio and is structured as an insurance contract with a HSBC-owned captive insurer...
