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London Borough of Hammersmith &
Fulham
Merseyside Pension Fund
HSBC Bank
Exel Trustees Ltd
Safeway
'Our experience has proven that
IMAS offers significant time efficiencies quarter after quarter. For
a moderate fee IMAS does all the labour intensive work meaning our
requirement is to verify and transfer the figures - it couldn't be
any simpler!
For us there was no
justification to continue stretching limited in-house resources when
we could capitalise on outsourcing to the professionals at IMAS.'
Halfield Jackman,
Pensions & Treasury Officer
London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham
'A
transition is an extremely difficult and
volatile time for a scheme of any size. In
order for the process to be completed successful planning is key.
There is a need to manage relationships with fund managers and
suppliers, internal resources should be carefully considered whilst
external resources can be utilised to manage peaks in activity as
required.
At
Merseyside Pension Fund we decided to use Euraplan's transition
monitoring service for our £1.8 billion transition as we felt that
their specialist assistance in developing relationships with a
number of new investment managers was beneficial and the detailed
reconciled accounts supplied were also helpful for audit purposes.
Using
Euraplan would reduce the risk of not keeping track of the
transactions and to ensure that internal systems were kept
up-to-date. No doubt internal resources would have struggled
significantly with the concentrated volume of work to be completed
in such a short period.
The
transition progressed successfully and Euraplan provided valuable
assistance in establishing the new structure.'
Patrick
Dowdall, Investment
Monitoring Officer
Merseyside Pension Fund
'When
it became necessary for us to outsource our investment accounting
resources Euraplan was the natural choice.
By
making use of Euraplan’s Investment Monitoring Service, HSBC has
been able to win savings in terms of salaries while enjoying a level
of service that meets our very exacting standards.
In
addition, HSBC may also benefit from best practice advice based on
the experience of Euraplan’s Investment Monitoring team.
Euraplan’s Investment Monitoring Service is also in its own way a major
asset for us at a time when the compliance, accounting and
investment issues facing pension funds are particularly intense and
demanding.
We are very pleased that we took the Euraplan outsourcing route for our
investment accounting requirements.’
Richard
Service, Investments Manager
HSBC Bank
‘In
my view the third-party route is the correct one to go down when it
comes to ensuring the safety of asset transfer and revenue during a
period of transition.
At
such a crucial stage of the fund's restructuring, it is essential
that the pension scheme has an independent guarantee that all of the
fund's assets have been accounted for, as given by Euraplan's
Transition and Investment Monitoring Services.
Knowing that our fund monitoring is being handled by
such a highly professional and competent organisation such as
Euraplan gives us enormous reassurance.
This fund
monitoring represents a major duty of care for our trustees; they
need to be certain that the job is being handled with the utmost
professionalism.'
Jimmy
Walker, Pensions Manager
Exel Trustees Ltd
'Based
on my experience at Safeway, a transition exercise is an extremely
volatile time for a pension fund, with an enormous amount of transactions
and financial exchanges taking place within a very short period of time.
If you do not have an independent system in place to record and monitor
all the movements initiated by all the players actively involved, it is
almost impossible to guarantee
that nothing has gone astray.
And, we are talking about millions of pounds!'
Peter Baker,
formerly Pensions Manager
Safeway Pension Scheme
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