Featured in Professional in Payroll, Pensions & Reward, the official publication of The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals.

Smaller defined benefit (DB) pension schemes face a multitude of challenges, from keeping up with ever-changing legislation and regulatory guidance, to protecting their members from pension scams and ensuring good governance generally. On top of that, smaller DB schemes suffer from huge diseconomies of scale, with running costs that are typically a multiple of those that large schemes pay for the same services (when expressed on a cost per member basis). It is no wonder that consolidation is such a hot topic in the industry.