Who will these new members be?
We need to see how the market evolves. Five years ago no one was talking about master trusts, but now they are a core part of our membership. As the market evolves I would expect us to end up with more from the advisory community as in-retirement products develop in the wake of freedom and choice. We have a broad membership as it is and I don’t think people quite understand its breadth; we have financial advisers, asset managers, consultants, communications agencies, so a whole group of members who provide really valuable services to members. I think the membership will evolve as it always has, but it has the scope to evolve further and hopefully a bit faster.
How do you intend to cover new areas such as ISAs and the equity release market?
This is something which will happen organically so over the course of the next year or so you will see us doing research on these areas, for example. The Understanding Retirement research we produced this year has some really interesting results, such as the emphasis people place on property, so we need to think about what that means. Are people deluding themselves if they just say ‘my property’s my pension?’ What does it mean longer term? What are the intergenerational consequences of that? You will see some research and more sessions at conferences talking about those broader issues. There are a whole load of equity release companies out there, some of whom are attached to our existing members so it will be really short-sighted of us if we just said, ‘This is us, we are very narrowly- focused on pensions as they have always existed’ because you have George Osborne saying, ‘You can treat your pension like a bank account, let’s tax pensions like ISAs’, and you can’t ignore that. If savers are saying, ‘my property is my pension, my business is my pension, my ISA is my pension, my savings are my pension’, we can’t ignore that and if there are businesses who subscribe to that view and share our passion for that, they are all welcome.
What do you make of those who described the rebrand as a ‘land grab’? Was there a commercial aspect to it?
I have seen some comments, they make for a good story but they really do miss the point. Someone said to me recently: ‘Someone said you did this in the wake of Daniel Godfrey’s resignation from the Investment Association’ and I thought: ‘Oh yeah, so we have done a whole rebrand of an organisation that has existed for 90 years in the space of two weeks just because Daniel went – I think not’. We spent a long time thinking about the future direction of this organisation and what is right for our members and retirement savers in the UK, and we made those decisions based on what is right for us. So this isn’t about other trade associations, it isn’t about land grab and it isn’t about taking over the world, it is about what is right for us, our members and the future direction of pensions saving in the UK and that is what sat behind our decision.
So it is not to revive the association’s membership numbers?
We had 70-something new members last year, our membership numbers are stable and we had a bunch of members join over the course of last week. When we issue our next membership fees they will go up by inflation, so this is not a cheap shot to jackup fees because frankly there are different ways of doing that if we wanted to. A lot has been made recently of the blurring of boundaries between the role of regulators and lobby groups.
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