Exaxe | Life, Pensions & Wealth Blog

This article was originally commissioned and published in December 2015 for Investment Life & Pensions Moneyfacts. Tom Murray considers the troublesome wait for Brexit and how this uncertainty could cause major volatility in the investment markets.

The biggest shock of last week in the pension’s world came with the announcement from Lufthansa that their defined benefit pension scheme deficit had now gone over €10 billion. This is a frightening figure – to put it in context it is up 41% since the end of 2014 and it equals the entire national debt of Bulgaria. While some of this increase is due to the current low-interest rate policy of the European Central Bank and will be ameliorated over time, nevertheless it is still a huge problem for the company which posted an operating loss of €133 million in the first quarter of this year.

The May / June print edition of TechLife is now available online. TechLife is published every quarter and is filled with news, opinion pieces, white papers and information on legislative changes within the life and pensions industry in the UK and abroad.

A recent survey by Blackrock’s Global Investor Pulse showed that young people aged between 25 and 34 have a stark problem. They believe they need at least £54,000 to live on in retirement. That’s fine; except for the fact that they also believe they need to accumulate a lump sum of £375,500 in order to give themselves this income in retirement.

Three months after shaking up the pensions market, the government has decided it’s time to do it again. Following the complete ‘liberation’ of the pension market announced in the budget, heralded by the abolition of the compulsion to purchase annuities with pension pots, the government has decided that they will introduce Collective Defined Contribution (CDC) schemes, commonly called ‘Dutch-style collective pensions’ from their popularity in the Netherlands, into the UK market.

The February print edition of TechLife is now available online. TechLife is published every quarter and is filled with news, opinion pieces, white papers and information on legislative changes within the life and pensions industry in the UK and abroad.

This article was originally commissioned for the January edition of the Actuarial Post.

The September print edition of TechLife is now available. TechLife is published every quarter and is filled with industry news, white papers and information on legislative changes.

This article was originally commissioned and published in May 2013 for Investment Life & Pensions Moneyfacts publication. Tom Murray, Head of Product Strategy at Exaxe, explores why the OECD is steering the Irish pensions system away from auto-enrolment and what UK pension reformers could learn from this.

There are people who refuse to go to doctors, preferring self-diagnosis to getting a professional opinion. For many common illnesses their diagnosis is often correct. After all, most of us can diagnose when we have a cold, the flu, or a chest infection. So of course they can “cure” themselves, which reinforces their feeling that that they are as knowledgeable as the medics.