Good Afternoon, and welcome to Glaziers Hall and the Redington (Un)conference.
I am Robert Gardner co-CEO of Redington. We are currently the 4th largest investment consultant by assets under consulting and we are building Redington into a global force in the pensions industry. Our goal is to ensure that the next generation can continue to be better off than the last.
I am going to take 5 minutes to set the context for the ideas you will hear from the team.
It all begins with our purpose. Everything we do at Redington begins with the question – “What if everyone felt confident and in control of their financial future”
This helps guide us as to how and what we do to achieve this. From providing Investment Consulting advice to our clients, to designing new investment strategies to meet the needs of individuals in retirement, through to the provision of free financial education and our aim of teaching 1 million young people to budget, save, invest and give back.
It’s important to note that in order to solve the problems we face as an industry requires innovation.
This is more than just new ideas it requires people like Paul Cooper at Friends Provident in 2003 to adopt and implement new ideas based on an intuitive decision about what they believe to be right.
This is hard to do as there are no competing products or strategies to compare and contrast. No history or track record to analyse. In 2003 the word LDI didn’t exist, there were no LDI fund managers, in fact no pension fund had ever entered into long dated interest rate and inflation swaps to hedge their liabilities.
There were many reasons not to do this new idea. However Paul believed that this idea made sense it answered the exam question “how can we grow the assets to meet the deficit and protect the funding level?”.
This is innovation!
Most of us feel uncomfortable being the first when it comes to using new products and services be it Air BnB, tesla electric cars and Uber. In order to adopt these new ideas most of us rely on someone else trying it first.
In order for ideas to become established and main stream requires the early adopters. People like Frank Schinella our first client at Redington. In fact Frank was an innovator and an early adopter. It took a lot of personal risk for Frank to recommend hiring Redington a firm that was less than 6 months old and only just FSA registered at the time. But Frank like Paul believed we could help him feel in control of the pension fund by delivering an investment strategy with stable investment returns whilst managing risk.
Away from investments some of you, such as Robert Burgon, CEO at the plumbing pension fund in Edinburgh share our belief that when people are knowledgeable and confident about their personal financial decisions, their personal wealth will prosper as a result. When we set up RedStart in late 2012 it wasn’t obvious but thanks to many of you who share our dream we have been able to deliver over 3,500 hours of free financial education and a platform to scale and grow.
It takes courage to make decisions that will benefit the next generation. In fact all of you in this room fall into the category of innovators and early adopters. It’s people like you who take new ideas and make it mainstream through your validation.
In fact for new ideas to be created, implemented and adopted requires us to be responsible i.e. have the courage to do what is right in order to benefit the next generation, openness to new ideas, tools and techniques and a willingness to share them so they can be improved by others and the clarity to communicate to our stakeholders Why? What? And How? We do it.
I believe if we all do this together, behaving with these values we can reach that tipping point where collectively as an industry we can solve the pensions challenge.
The context for the next hour is to share some ideas which we believe will help the pensions industry repair their deficits and protect their funding levels.
The goal in everything we do is to leave you feeling confident and in control.
Thank you
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Agenda
- Redington Investment Principles – David Bennett
- Rethinking Equity Allocations – Philip Rose
- Risk Parity: Balancing Different Asset Class Risks – Dan Mikulskis
- CTA: Has the Trend Been Your Friend – Aniket Das
- ILS: From Hot to Not – Neha Bhargava
- An Alternative to Alternatives – Patrick O’Sullivan
- Staying Ahead of the Credit Curve – Nick Lewis
- Hidden Value in CRE Debt – Kate Mijakowska
- Leasing Finance & Lifetime Mortgages – Greg Federenko
- Interrogation: Multi-Class Credit – Sebastian Schulze