Our investment strategy is designed using two investment funds, one targeting long-term growth and one aimed at protecting the value of built-up pension savings. Members’ pension savings are gradually switched from one to the other starting 15 years before their target retirement age.
How we've designed our strategy
Simple – and reassuring
We’ve designed our investment strategy to be simple and reassuring to explain to your employees. The main message is: ‘Your money will be looked after by professionals. You don’t need to make difficult choices’.
Choice isn't popular
Our one-solution approach is supported by evidence that shows that most people in workplace pension schemes don’t make investment choices. When we looked at other auto enrolment pension providers, we found over 99% of their pension scheme members were in the default investment option and had never made another choice.
We believe most people saving for retirement are happy to know professionals are investing their money and taking responsibility for making investment choices.
Strategy design
The investment strategy is designed to:
- grow your employees’ pension savings steadily over the long term, despite the ups and downs in investment markets, and
- protect the value of their pension savings from sudden falls in value as they approach retirement.
We use two investment funds to achieve this.
Diversified Growth Fund (DGF)
The Diversified Growth Fund (DGF) targets stable long-term growth for Scheme members during most of their working lives. It does this using ‘diversification’ – a range of different types of investment.
We’ve set the DGF a higher target with the aim of increasing its growth potential by broadening our areas of investment.
Find out more about our Diversified Growth Fund (DGF).
Retirement Countdown Fund (RCF)
As Scheme members get closer to retirement most of their pension savings are gradually switched into the Retirement Countdown Fund (RCF). The RCF is designed to reduce the risk of built-up pension savings falling in value before they’re turned into retirement benefits. We call this switching period the ‘Journey Path’.
We’ve further reduced the risk by extending the Journey Path from 10 to 15 years.
Find out more about our Retirement Countdown Fund (RCF).
Protection and safeguarding
We employ a custodian to protect the Scheme funds by holding them in a ring-fenced account, separate from both NOW: Pensions and the custodian’s own money.
Our custodian is BNY Mellon, one of the world’s largest custodians. It looks after over US$30 trillion on behalf of pension schemes and other investors.
It has strong credit ratings: for example, the credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s rates it AA (low) for long-term deposits.