James Redgrave, managing editor
I have joined PLANSPONSOR Europe as employers across the continent face an uncertain landscape for their staffs' future pensions, savings and benefits.This comes as the gradual acceptance that old certainties are gone has yet to be replaced with a firm idea of what is to come.
As companies, law makers and regulators come up with
increasingly sophisticated ways to manage the decline of the old fashioned
defined benefit as humanely as possible, they are only beginning to turn their
attention to their other great difficulty.
Specifically this is how to turn the market for defined
contribution savings into one that even begins to replicate DB in the
retirement incomes it produces.
In the UK this change is being driven to the large extent by
government, with the long-awaited auto-enrolment legislation coming into force
next month.
But other European nations are, arguably, further down the
road in terms of DC provision –frequently aided by their own legal and
regulatory regimes – with collective DC in the Netherlands and simple sponsor
pledges in Germany, pointing to ways of providing some extra security for
members.
For businesses who wish to provide a pension for their
staff, either as part of a legal obligation, or as part of a range of benefits,
it is crucial to be informed about how a market so clearly and rapidly
changing, is going to continue to change.
It is important to know what the latest new laws and
regulations are and how to react to them.
It is important to know how what new tools and systems the
industry is building to offer employee pensions and other benefits.
It is important to know which of these tools and systems are
useful and worth what they cost.
PLANSPONSOR Europe is written for those responsible for
corporate pensions, who grapple with these questions every day.
And as its new managing editor, it will be this title’s
dedicated aim to provide as much knowledge as we can about what’s happening and
– perhaps more importantly – what’s going to happen, in order for Europe’s key
workplace pension decision makers to start making the best informed decisions
they can, for their members.