New Financial and CMIT Conference

William Wright, the founder and managing director of New Financial, was delighted to be invited to compere the second @Capital Markets Industry Taskforce conference and present the findings of our latest report on the asset allocation of pension funds around the world. The CMIT conference, hosted at the London Stock Exchange, brought together more than 200 senior participants from across the UK’s private and public capital markets, government, regulators and policymakers.

William moderated a panel discuss on the future of UK pensions with @Nausicaa Delfas, chief executive of The Pensions Regulator; @Peter Harrison, chief executive of Schroders; @Sir Nicholas Lyons, chairman of Phoenix Group; and @Tessa Page, partner and UK wealth strategy leader at Mercer.

He also presented the highlights of our latest research, in partnership with the CMIT, on ‘Comparing the asset allocation of global pension systems’.

The report brings an important international perspective to the debate over the past few years on how much (or how little) UK pension funds invest in the UK stock market by comparing the UK with 12 other developed pension systems. 

The differences in the structure between different pension systems mean that an aggregate level comparison is not very useful. So we also conducted a unique ‘apples to apples’ comparison of the main ‘buckets’ of pensions in the UK with the most relevant ‘buckets’ of pensions in other systems: comparing UK public sector defined benefit (DB) pensions with, for example, public sector pensions in Canada; defined contribution (DC) pensions with the likes of Australian supers; and private sector DB schemes in the UK with their counterparts in the US and other markets.

We hope that our report provides a valuable contribution on the future development of UK’s capital markets and is directly relevant to the current political debate, with the new Labour government launching a pensions review and thinking about how to encourage more investment by UK pensions in the UK.

To read more about our report click here.