Master trust regulatory control should be transferred to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) because the Pensions Regulator (TPR) lacks the necessary skills and powers to properly authorise and supervise major financial institutions.
That was the main takeaway from Capital Cranfield professional trustee and former TPR director Andrew Warwick-Thompson’s talk at the Corporate Adviser summit. His talk focused on the need to remove barriers to ensure favourable outcomes for individuals saving in defined contribution (DC) pension schemes.
Warwick-Thompson argued that the focus should shift towards productive finance in a broader sense, rather than concentrating on a specific sector, as it better aligns with fiduciary duty.
He pointed out that certain master trusts, such as Nest and Cushon, are already venturing into alternative investments like private equity, while single employer schemes like JPMorgan have been doing so for several years.
Moreover, Warwick-Thompson stressed the urgent need for consolidating master trusts and advocated for speeding up this process, however, he said this needs mandating to improve efficiency in the pensions market
He also proposed master trusts should move away from what he described as outdated and restrictive structures based on traditional life fund investment platforms. Instead, he recommended adopting a model similar to the LGPS asset pools and Nest, which benefit from custody-based platforms and segregated mandates.
Warwick-Thompson also discussed the impact of forward-looking metrics in the value for money (VFM) framework, expecting a divergence of the strategies followed by master trusts from the traditional life office workplace pension offerings, with master trusts having potentially higher charges for DC defaults as they embrace more sophisticated investment strategies.
He said: “I’m expecting to see the development of investment strategies in the big master trusts which have a border range of alternatives. I don’t think they’ll focus on just private equity or VC.
“There’s regulation that restricts what you can invest in as a life fund and one of the reasons LTAF has been invented is so that you can invest in a life fund through an alternative, which would probably work for a range of alternative investments including private equity.”
He added: “This diversification into alternative assets is going to happen in stages. In the short run, I expect us to use LTAF with an insurance wrap around it and I expect that those will be multi-asset funds, rather than single asset classes. I don’t that we will see yet a private credit fund, private equity fund or VC fund. Multi-private asset offering is where the market seems to be at the moment.”
Warwick-Thompson also said that he strongly criticises the DWP for allowing performance fees to be excluded from the cap in DC pension schemes, viewing it as a significant mistake that is intergenerationally unfair and based upon a misunderstanding of how DC schemes operate. He called for the reversal of this decision, emphasising that the fee cap should apply universally without exceptions.
“In terms of cost, I have to criticise the DWP for its approach to allowing performance fees to be excluded from the cap. I think that’s a huge mistake. We were actually quite successful at battering the fees down. The charge cap isn’t actually the issue but what is the issue with performance fees is that it is intergenerationally unfair. Saying that a sovereign wealth fund or a DB scheme has performance fees so why can’t you have it in DC schemes is fundamentally a misunderstanding of how DC schemes work. I think DWP should reverse it.”
The Department for Work and Pensions declined to comment on Warwick-Thompson’s statement.