Just how effective is your pension strategy?

In today’s challenging environment, managing defined benefit pension schemes can be a headache for businesses in the UK, particularly when it is underpinned by wider economic uncertainty. Many companies feel that considerable resources are being dedicated to pensions, while meaningful progress against key strategic objectives are often being neglected, or have limited attention in the least.

All too often, senior company representatives and trustee boards become embroiled in lower level decisions associated with running pension arrangements, reducing the time available to focus on strategic direction and to achieve meaningful results.

Over the last two years, Aon has carried out a significant amount of research into the operational effectiveness of defined benefit (DB) pension arrangements. The survey, Time to focus on getting things done, highlights the following key themes amongst stretched pension managers:

• 70% of individuals responsible for pension schemes, feel decisions sometimes take months from being raised to being implemented
• 60% believe there are frequently agenda items at trustee meetings that don’t require decisions
• 40% think that they can’t consider new opportunities at short notice

Highlighting and addressing the issues constraining your company’s productivity is the first step in improving operational effectiveness. A solution to the problems can imclude delegating some of the responsibility to an external company. Aon’s Implemented Consulting is a framework that enables trustees and companies to set high-level strategic guidance and then lean more heavily on Aon to deliver against these actions with limited ongoing involvement, not only leading to a beneficial impact on the financial position of the pension scheme and company profitability, but also significantly reduce risk and free-up time to focus on the wider pension strategy or other areas of the business.

Implemented Consulting is designed to relieve individuals from time-consuming pension projects or low-level pension decisions and can help to:

1. Deliver on strategy: Companies and trustees can deliver key strategic actions with limited management time
2. Implement a successful pension strategy: Following trustee and company agreement on pension objectives, companies can benefit from an action plan from Aon’s pension experts, that factor in budget and risk which- once approved- will be implemented in full
3. Ensure strong governance: Reduce the time spent on trustee meetings by focusing on the key decisions, with day-to-day actions delegated to other individuals

To read more about how Implemented Consulting could help save your business time and money, including how other organisations have benefited from the framework, download this whitepaper.