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Our investment strategy

When it comes to an investment strategy for your workplace pension scheme, we keep it simple. We have one robust, carefully-thought-out, investment strategy which aims to give positive outcomes over the long term.

This enables you to offer your employees an investment solution that is well designed, good value and managed by experienced professionals.

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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’.

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.

Our investment funds

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 10 years before their target retirement age.

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.

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 gradual switching the ‘lifecycle’.

Find out more about the investment strategy.

Investment management

Our independent board of trustees is responsible for deciding how to invest members’ pension savings.

They take advice from professional investment advisers and they delegate day-to-day management decisions to investment managers.

The trustee board regularly reviews the investment objectives and decides how best to achieve them.

The trustee board has appointed Redington as our investment advisers and Cardano Risk Management Limited (CRML) as our investment manager.

Protection and safeguarding

We employ a custodian who holds the Scheme funds in a ring-fenced account, separate from both NOW: Pensions and the custodian’s own funds and company accounts.

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 as AA- for long-term deposits.

Investment information in detail

Statement of Investment Principles

Responsible and sustainable investment

Historical quarterly fund factsheets