FAQs for Members

Our investment strategy for the Scheme carefully balances different types of investment risk to help your money grow and protect its value – an approach known as lifestyling.

Lifestyling is an investment approach that’s designed to:
• grow your pension savings over most of your working life, then
• protect the value of those built-up pension savings as you approach your planned retirement age.

We do this through our Journey Path to retirement.

Fifteen years before your planned retirement age, we start to gradually switch most of your savings from our Diversified Growth Fund (designed to grow your savings) to our Retirement Countdown Fund (designed to protect your savings from falls in value). The aim is to reduce the risk of your pension savings falling in value as you get closer to retirement.

We explain this in more detail on pages 7-9 of our Member Booklet. You can download a copy here.

You can find out more about our investment strategy in our Statement of Investment Principles.

Part of our approach to responsible investing is making investment decisions based on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, without impacting the growth of your pension savings. This means investing in companies that have stronger sustainability characteristics and lower carbon footprints. These companies also achieve good standards on:

• environmental factors such as carbon emissions and water management
• social factors such as employee and local community relations, and
• governance factors such as board diversity and remuneration.

We receive the contributions from you and your employer and pass the money to our custodian, BNY Mellon, which holds it in a ring-fenced account on behalf of the NOW: Pensions Trustee.

Your money is then invested in line with the investment manager’s instructions. Our investment manager is Cardano Risk Management Limited (CRML), a subsidiary of Cardano Holding Limited.

The value of your pension savings is linked to the value of the fund’s investments. These values can go up or down over time, and these changes in value are a normal part of saving for a pension. As you get closer to retirement we gradually move your pension savings into investments that don’t change in value much.

This is designed to help protect the value of your savings before you turn them into retirement benefits – so ups and downs in investment markets are likely to have less effect on the value of your pension savings at that stage.

Yes. We’re formally authorised and regulated by The Pensions Regulator, having successfully gone through the master trust authorisation process in September 2019.

We’re one of approximately 38 master trusts approved and supervised on an ongoing basis by The Pensions Regulator to maintain the quality of master trust providers in the UK. This means increased protection for members and their pension savings. You can see a list of approved master trusts on their website.

Your fund value is updated each week, usually on a Friday or Saturday. Simply go to www.nowgatewayx.com and enter your NOW: Pensions contract ID or your email address (if you registered one), plus your NOW: Pensions password.

Your fund value summary shows the current value of your pension savings. This is the total amount you and your employer have paid in, plus any change in the value of your investments, less any charges. It also shows any additional voluntary contributions you’ve paid and any other pensions you’ve transferred in.

Yes. You can check the latest unit prices for our Diversified Growth Fund and our Retirement Countdown Fund here. You can also check historical fund fact sheets. See more on our Investment strategy page.

You may have noticed a fall in the overall value of your savings during 2020. This was due to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made markets more prone to big shifts between gains and losses.

This is normal, and we expect markets will continue to behave in a similarly hard-to-predict way. Pensions are a long-term investment for most people and remaining invested in the markets still remains the best approach. Don’t forget, if you’re within 15 years of your planned retirement age we’ve already started to protect your pension by gradually moving it to lower-risk investments. So the people closest to retirement wouldn’t have been affected as much by the changes in values caused by COVID-19.

Since March 2020 the Diversified Growth Fund has recovered much of its value. However, we expect further changes in values in the coming months and years. This is normal for an investment fund.