Feature | 2020 Wish list


Andy Agathangelou Founder The Transparency Taskforce


The FCA reigniting discussions


around the idea of a best interest duty or a duty of care would make my year.


If there was the equivalent of


a doctor’s Hippocratic oath in the financial services sector, it would be a paradigm shift in the way that people are regulated.


Fundamentally, trying to regu-


late the financial services sector to behave properly through rules that say you cannot do something, but if you do it in a slightly different way then it is technically compliant, so you can do it, is not going to solve the problem.


There are 1.4 million paragraphs in MiFID II so we cannot get where we want to go using a granular, rules- based mechanism. We need some- thing that adds up to a Hippocratic oath for the industry.


That would make my 2020


because it would open the door for a massive cultural transformational change in the financial services sector.


In the Tory manifesto they refer


to sorting out the taxation anomaly within the pension arena.


For me, one of the big ones is the


net pay relief at source issue. If you earn more than £10,000 you should be automatically enrolled, but in this tax year you do not pay income tax unless you earn more than £12,500.


Relief at source schemes take


80p from your salary and pass it to the pension provider who will invest £1 and claim the extra 20p back from HMRC.


In a net pay arrangement, the


employer takes £1 off your gross salary and passes it to the pension provider, which means you get tax relief for the highest rate you pay, but if you don’t pay tax because you earn less than £12,500, you don’t get the tax relief. That is a huge anomaly which effects a lot of automatically enrolled members and is something we and others have been banging on at HMRC, the Treasury and the DWP about to get addressed.


It is in the Tory manifesto, but


with Brexit they haven’t given it the time it deserves. So, if I had a wish for 2020 it would be to get that addressed.


Rob Booth Director of investment and product development Now Pensions


Claire Curtin Head of ESG Pension Protection Fund


On the ESG side, regulation is


going to continue to be one of the main areas of contention.


There is going to be a lot of


attention on what the EU is doing, but how that pertains to the UK depends on Brexit outcomes, etc. There is still a lack of clarity around what pension funds are going to need to do in the UK that might be different in the EU or whether the same agenda will be transferred across.


Sharon Smith Head of investment South Yorkshire Pensions Authority


Move past the talk about Brexit


and let the economy speak for itself. The main thing is to get rid of the uncertainty. It’s not doing any of us any good.


30 | portfolio institutional | December-January 2020 | issue 89


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