Schemes with £50 million worth of assets or less.  However, this is a rough guide rather than a fixed rule.  Our clients range in size from under £1 million to £300 million. Our average client size is £18m.

Yes.  While we are happy to advise on larger schemes, we offer this on the same basis as our services to small schemes.

No.  We prefer working with small schemes. We plan to grow by working with more schemes rather than larger schemes.

Many investment consultants see working with larger schemes as more glamorous.  They aspire to work on more complex and more detailed solutions.  We don’t.  A solution that gives a 0.01% improvement to a £1bn scheme produces £100,000 of benefit.  That would be a worthwhile exercise for the scheme, but it wouldn’t make a substantial difference to its members and we would find it hard to get excited about it.  We prefer making a noticeable difference to members, even if there are fewer of them.  Working with small schemes means that we spend most of our time on significant issues.

Yes we do.  We find that size of scheme is less relevant for sponsoring companies and that they tend to require one-off reviews of the main strategic issues rather than ongoing consultancy.  This lends itself to our style of working.

We can advise you on:

• Defined benefit (DB) schemes, where pensions and benefits paid to members are directly related to specified criteria such as the length of service and salary at retirement. The most common examples are final salary schemes and career average revalued earnings schemes.
• Defined contribution (DC) schemes, where each member accumulates their own assets with which to purchase benefits on retirement (often called money purchase schemes).