Our investment solutions

 
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We offer ready-made and fully-governed investment solutions for your workplace pension, along with a range of self-select funds for your employees who prefer to take a hands-on approach.

Our investment solutions…

  • offer flexibility and choice
  • help your employees prepare for the type of retirement outcome they want
  • make it easy for employees to make investment choices
  • offer expert investment management at value for money
  • are regularly reviewed to ensure an effective mix of investments to achieve good outcomes for your employees.

 

Scottish Widows Lifetime Investment

Scottish Widows Lifetime Investment is our innovative, fully-governed and flexible pension default investment option. It’s designed to maximise growth potential to support sustainable income in retirement by investing in a range of assets via best-in-class managers with responsible investment fitted as standard.

It has a range of options designed to make it easy for employees to save for their retirement. These options offer different levels of risk and target different ways for employees to take their pension in later life, be it flexible access, guaranteed income or taking it all as cash. 

When members are years away from their selected retirement age (SRA), we invest with the aim of giving them what we believe is the best chance of growth. As they get closer to their SRA, we’ll gradually move their pension savings into investments with less risk. This aims to help protect their pension’s value, known as pension ‘lifestyling’.

More information can be found in our Scottish Widows Lifetime Investment adviser and employer guide (PDF, 1MB) and our member guide (PDF, 1MB).

 

Bespoke 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.  

 

Other options

Your employees can choose to stay in the default option selected by you, move into one of our alternative lifestyle options, or be more hands-on and choose from the range of self-select funds we make available. This range includes funds from well-established external fund managers to complement our internally-managed funds.  

These ‘self-select’ funds have no lifestyling, so employees need to be comfortable about managing their own levels of risk through their retirement planning journey. We provide information for employees who want to move from a lifestylying option to self-select funds to help them decide whether it’s the right decision, helping to protect their retirement outcomes.

For more details and information about the investment solutions available, please contact us.

Investing responsibly

We believe environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors can be financially material and impact corporate profitability, which in turn impacts our investments. So, we aim to manage ESG risks and opportunities in our investments to help safeguard our customers' long-term savings and help shape a better world to retire into.

To do this, we invest less in companies we believe aren't dealing well with ESG factors and more in companies working hard on things like reducing their negative impact on the planet and society. We also work with companies to help them to become more sustainable. We’ve partnered with leaders in sustainable investing to help deliver our responsible investment approach.

Find out more about our responsible investment policies and approaches.

Enhancements to our Pension Investment Approaches

Scottish Widows Pension Investment Approaches (PIAs) are our established pension lifestyle options which have been delivering strong results for members since launch in 2006. We’re continually evolving the PIAs. We’ve been making some changes to enhance our ability to maximise growth potential to better help members achieve their retirement goals. To do this, we’re aligning PIA with our new default investment proposition Scottish Widows Lifetime Investment. We’re doing this gradually with the aim of avoiding sudden increases in risk and to help minimise the impact of any market volatility.

We’ve created dedicated infosites for members to help them understand the changes and where they are on the evolution journey. 

You can find out more about the PIA evolution in our guide (PDF, 3MB), or for Scottish Widows Master Trust schemes on the dedicated website.

Pensions are a long-term investment. The retirement benefits your employees receive from their pension plan will depend on a number of factors including the value of their plan when they decide to take their benefits which isn't guaranteed, and can go down as well as up. The value of their plan could fall below the amount(s) paid in.

For employer use only.