2022: Year in Review

By Jess Williams, Head of CIS and Relationships

It’s been a busy year for the team at Phoenix Corporate Investment Services. As always, our focus has been on delivering for our clients and their scheme members, as we continue to pursue our Group-wide ambition of helping people secure a life of possibilities.

Over the past 12 months, we have supported clients to effectively manage change to the value of around £1bn, enabling them to meet a wide range of strategic investment objectives and deliver positive outcomes for scheme members.

This has included restructuring assets on our platform to offer a wider range of sustainable investment options, facilitating access to more illiquid asset classes, and supporting clients to navigate difficult market conditions during transitions that coincided with the fallout of September’s mini budget.

We continue to work closely with trustees and their advisors to understand the support and solutions they will require in future as their schemes’ needs evolve and are collaborating with key industry partners to share insights and best practice that will contribute to better outcomes in the long term.

This year we have invested around £4 million across projects that enhance our platform and wider service offering, ensuring that we are supporting our clients with the investment innovation they want and the governance support they need. And we will continue to evolve our proposition to deliver the solutions our clients need, when they need them.

This year we have focused increasingly on providing access to more sustainable investment options. For one of our clients, this has meant restructuring the majority of assets on our platform to include a wider range of investments meeting environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria, both as part of its DC default strategy and for members making self-select choices.

Phoenix Group was able to pre-fund over £100 million of trades for the client to mitigate out-of-market risk, and the transition was successfully managed to minimise the impact of change.

We are also building our reporting capability to help trustees and their members understand more about the funds they invest in, based on ESG criteria. This functionality is due to be rolled out in 2023 and will evolve over time as our clients’ needs change so we can support them and their members with meaningful data around responsible investment choices.

With the investment case for illiquids becoming an increasingly important consideration for DC default strategies and Master Trusts, we are building solutions to overcome the challenges associated with investing in illiquid asset classes such as private equity.

This year we worked with TPT Retirement Solutions to introduce private equity into its DC default target date funds (TDFs), giving members access to the potential growth opportunities afforded by investing in an illiquid asset class. A full case study can be found here.

Looking ahead to 2023, we expect to see further solutions rolled out on our platform, including the launch of Long Term Asset Funds (LTAFs), as these become more widely available to the DC market.

An increasing number of pension schemes now fall in scope of the Occupational Pension Schemes (Climate Change Governance and Reporting) Regulations 2021, and at Phoenix CIS we have invested significantly in our capability to support Trustees and their advisors with metrics data for the climate-related disclosures in the compilation of their schemes’ TCFD report.

We now actively offer a range of options to support our clients with data including providing valuations and investment holdings data for funds on the platform, and completing the mandatory metric calculations on carbon emissions.

As these regulations evolve, we will continue to engage directly with our trustee clients and their advisors to ensure our proposition meets and supports their needs.

This year has seen a welcome return to face-to-face events, and we have benefitted from the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from industry peers within the pensions and investment space.

In May, I joined a panel of experts at the PLSA’s Investment Conference at the EICC in Edinburgh to discuss accessing private markets for DC investors.

In the same month we hosted our hybrid event, Global Pensions Perspective, which brought together high-profile speakers from across the globe to share insights into current trends and their impact on pensions and savings. A link to the event recordings can be found here.

More recently we hosted a webinar in partnership with Professional Pensions, with guest speaker Philip Smith, DC Director at TPT Retirement Solutions. The session focused on some of the challenges facing occupational schemes at the current time, and the solutions offered by investment only platforms to help address these.

“Phoenix CIS have always put our requirements at the forefront of any development. They demonstrated a clear understanding of our investment objectives, and were able to develop an innovative solution to meet our needs.

“The flexibility of their platform has enabled us to diversify our investment portfolio, giving members access to alternative assets and potentially improving investment outcomes in the long term.”

Philip Smith, DC Director, TPT Retirement Solutions

"We worked with Phoenix Corporate Investment Services for 18 years, before eventually moving to a Master Trust arrangement in 2022. During that time, the team managed our day-to-day - and sometimes more complex - requirements with ease, and we are grateful for the hard work and excellent service they provided when looking after our scheme.

"Even during our move away from the platform, that service was maintained at the highest level and the team could not have been more helpful. Despite the unfortunate timing of the transfer, which coincided with the fallout of the Government's 2022 mini budget, Phoenix CIS ensured that long-standing transfer preparations were redone at short notice and special arrangements made for property funds that could have derailed the whole project. There was nothing we asked for that wasn't done, innovative solutions were implemented, and we cannot thank the team enough for ensuring the smooth transition of funds at a difficult time. Our new scheme owners will have a lot to live up to!"

Richard Morley-Jacob, Head of Pensions and Insurances, Slaughter and May

Finally, on behalf of my exceptional team, I would just like to thank our clients, their advisors and our fund manager partners for continuing to support the CIS business throughout 2022 and challenging us to strive for better and deliver innovation in our market. I wish you all the very best for the festive period and look forward to working closely with you in 2023.

Jess Williams, Head of CIS & Relationships