Competition Heats Up U.K. Auto-Enrollment Pension Fund Market

You have to say this for the British: When it comes to nationally run retirement plans, if one idea doesn’t work out, they go back and try again. And so it happened that the goal of enrolling nearly every worker in the U.K. into a pension scheme became a reality — and for asset management firms, a dream.

不是它一直很容易。在2001年未能获得昂贵，可选的利益相关者养老金计划设计之后，U.K.于2002年返回绘图委员会，任命了由U.K.商人和学术勋爵的养老金委员会。

In October 2012 the U.K. Department for Work and Pensions came out with a new system, dubbed auto enrollment. As the program’s name suggests, eligible employees are automatically placed in a retirement savings plan, with a three-month window allowing workers to opt out. The nationwide rollout of these schemes is on track to create a massive new pension pot estimated to grow by between £8 billion ($13.3 billion) and £12 billion, according to the DWP(see “顶级丹麦养老基金ATP在U.K. Market中迈出了进展”)。

凭借约800万个新的储蓄者，旨在将其资金交给保险，共同基金和其他养老金管理公司，管理这一当场的战斗处于良好的过程中。今年4月至7月之间，预计40,000名雇主将在新的养老金计划中自动注册雇员。但首先，他们必须选择监督资产的实体。

“我们将能够满足一百万雇主进入市场的需求吗？”询问亨利·塔佩珀，伦敦首次精算的校长和5,000名成员养老金普拉肯亲和力集团的创始人。Tapper公司设计了一个自动化系统，帮助兽医提供商。

比赛正在开启。已经建立了超过50个主信托，但并非所有人都将生存，注意索卡凯利学者，欧洲，中东和非洲的客户战略和研究负责人在伦敦。她预计只有大约十到20个大型自动注册计划，以幸存这种新竞争的景观。Kelly-Scholte希望获奖者将有助于在计划中创造规模 - 主要是定义的贡献计划 - 这将转化为降低成本和成员更好的福利。

一系列方案提供商是争吵的位置。有些计划已经注册了大量的新成员。然而，胜利最有可能达到最适合特定市场利基的人。

拥有100万会员已注册，最大的提供商是国家就业储蓄信托（巢）。As part of the reforms mandated by the U.K. Pensions Act 2008, the Pensions Commission established NEST, a government-sponsored program, to ensure there would be adequate capacity to handle the incoming flood of new savers, and to provide a low-cost scheme with solid investment options. It was designed to charge only 30 basis points— a 0.3 percent fee — on assets. That changed when the cost of setting up the scheme made a 20-year government loan necessary, driving fees up to approximately 0.5 percent of a member’s NEST assets. A 2001 law that tried to bring people into so-called stakeholder养老金那a type of defined contribution plan, set a ceiling for plan fees of 1.5 percent. This is one reason that very few workers signed on to plans at that time. On March 27, Pensions Minister Steve Webb announced a new fee cap of 0.75 percent, due to become effective in April 2015.

Another low-cost scheme was created when the opportunity to broaden the reach of its pension plan inspired officials at the multiemployer Building & Civil Engineering (B&CE) Benefit Schemes, which serves workers in the U.K.’s construction industry, to establish the People’s Pension, an auto-enrollment plan for low- to moderate-wage earners working in industries that have high employee turnover — such as construction. Before the inception of NEST, the People’s Pension was the largest stakeholder pension scheme in the U.K.; with auto enrollment it has grown to roughly a half million members.

As at NEST, the People’s Pension’s all-in costs are 50 basis points. Not an资产管理platform, the B&CE pension scheme, founded in the 1940s for union members, was redesigned in the past decade as a contractual auto-enrollment pension. With the advent of auto enrollment across the U.K., the new People’s Pension established a master trust with one default fund, using a passive index from Legal & General Group, the U.K.’s largest provider of “tracker” funds. With 99 percent of its members in the default fund, People’s Pension offers the remaining 1 percent a menu of seven other fund options, including cash and so-called adventurous or cautious funds. These are funds of funds, similar to U.S. “lifestyle” funds, that guide投资者to choose an option based on their risk tolerance.

“养老金远太复杂，我们需要更简单，“B＆Ce总部位于克劳利村，位于西萨塞克斯南部克劳斯村的B＆Ce负责人。菲尔普曾在全国养老基金协会的政策主任，汽车登记率的退出率在6％的额度上运行。“我们没有为降压或股东而这样做，”他补充道。“你不得不把利润从整个过程中脱颖而出。”

Providers that charge higher management fees have yet to see those earnings, as auto enrollment is moving glacially toward its 2017 goal of an 8 percent total contribution rate from employers and employees. For now it is only 1 percent each, a decision made by Parliament to keep from scaring off new savers.

“At the moment, it’s a flood of people rather than money,” confirms Adrian Boulding, pension strategy director at Legal & General in London. “We’ve taken on a half million new customers. The big money, we hope, comes later on down the track.”

Legal & General is positioned on the higher end of the pension market in terms of fees and does not accept small or otherwise unattractive employers — for example, those with low-wage workers who would contribute fewer assets to the scheme. “A big, successful company doesn’t want a government scheme,” Boulding points out. “It wants something that makes its employees feel special.”

New York–based黑石那the world’s largest资产管理公司，也已在新的养老金指南下，在2012年10月以来的汽车入学人员开始于205,000名计划成员，从205,000名计划成员兑现的界定捐款业务膨胀。这表明，如果提供低成本，高质量的投资计划，则如何从U.K中出发的全新提供商。另一个例子现在是现在：养老金，巨型丹麦养老基金的子公司atp.那which gathered 250,000 members in 18 months.

将the U.K.’s new auto-enrollment program deliver as promised? “The reason it works is because it was an independent consensus with the Turner commission,” explains B&CE’s Philp. “There are still massive debates about the level of contributions, rip-offs by insurance companies” and other issues, he says. “But the consensus is that we needed a government-supported national savings scheme. The disagreement is on detail, not concept.” That is something for other large Western pension-challenged nations to think about.

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