Our investment solutions
We offer a wide range of investment choices for you to select from including ready-made and fully-governed solutions through to highly bespoke options. This means we can support your employees who want a completely managed solution or those who prefer a hands-on approach.
We aim to:
- make it easy for employees to make investment choices
- review and test our investment risk and reward regularly
- offer expert investment management at value for money
- help your employees prepare for the type of retirement outcome they want
- provide an investment proposition that offers flexibility and choice.
Investment options available
Our lifestyling options have been designed to be used as default investment options, and they all support pension freedoms by offering pathways to Flexible Access, Annuity and Cash.
Our default Pension Investment Approaches have a long track record as robust and reliable lifestyling options. Your employees can elect to stay in the default option or choose to move into a different lifestyling option. For those employees who prefer greater choice and flexibility we offer a large selection of internally and externally managed funds from a range of fund managers. These funds have no lifestyling, so employees need to be comfortable about managing their own levels of risk.
If you choose not to offer your employees one of our lifestyling options as the default investment option, some of our products allow you to create your own default investment solution. This would require you or your adviser to assume the responsibility for the ongoing suitability of your chosen default option and the investment range offered.
We can also offer scheme specific and blended fund solutions within some of our product solutions.
For more details and information about the investment solutions available, please contact us.
Responsible investment
Our responsible investment approach aims to benefit your employees, the planet and society. See how we’re putting our approach into action.
Find out more about our responsible investment.
Integrating ESG considerations into our default pension solution
We’re embracing responsible investment practices in our aim to deliver good investment outcomes for customers. This allows us to manage environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks and returns in a more effective way in the funds we offer.
We’re investing where we can in companies we believe are making a difference on ESG grounds, and working with other companies we invest in to help them evolve into more sustainable businesses. We’re also excluding companies which we believe pose too much of an investment risk due to the nature of their businesses.
Find out more in our guide (PDF, 975KB)
Read about the BlackRock ACS Climate Transition World Equity Fund (PDF, 2MB).
Our Strategic Asset Allocation
We regularly review our Pension Investment Approaches, and the funds which we invest in, with the aim of maintaining an appropriate investment mix for your employees.
These reviews help us adapt them to reflect the evolving market and economic environment, changes to our long-term outlook and to take advantage of any new opportunities.
Our 2023 Strategic Asset Allocation review has resulted in several changes to the funds including:
- Further reducing the UK bias to UK equities
- Diversifying the bond element of the portfolios by introducing an allocation to a passive 0–5 year UK government bond fund
- Slightly reducing the allocation to global real estate investment trusts
Read our Strategic Asset Allocation Report (PDF, 2MB) for more information.
Asset allocation explainer
We’ve produced an article for you to share with your employees which explains why asset allocation is important for pension fund growth: 2023 Asset Allocation (PDF, 386KB).
Support for your employees
Helping your employees through market volatility and investor uncertainty
It’s normal for the value of a pension to go up and down over the short term. This is because pensions are likely to be invested in company shares and other stock market investments that also carry risk. These tend to go through periods of upwards and downwards price movements, including sudden changes over the short term, known as volatility. To support your employees during turbulent investment periods, we’ve developed three films focussing on the following subjects:
You can share our Investing in the Stock Market page with your employees where they can view these films and learn more about stock market volatility.
Investments explained
We recognise that for many the investment element of pensions can seem both confusing and complex, so we've created a series of four short films for you to share with your employees.
The films cover the following investment related topics:
For employer use only.