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Avoiding legal and regulatory pitfalls in digital transformation projects
This article first appeared in the September 2024 issue of Financier Worldwide.
United Kingdom | Publication | March 2023
On February 22, 2023, the Regulator launched a new campaign to ensure that trustees are complying with their environmental, social and governance and climate change reporting duties. Under the new reporting duties, trustees of schemes with 100 or more members are required to publish their statement of investment principles and implementation statement on a publicly available, free to access, website. Additionally, schemes with relevant assets of £1bn or more, as well as authorised master trusts and collective money purchase schemes, must publish an annual climate change report (the TCFD report).
The Regulator will check whether trustees are publishing their SIPs and that these contain the policies in relation to ESG and climate change factors. The Regulator will also monitor compliance by analysing scheme return data and review a cross-section of SIPs and implementation statements. The outcome of this review will be published to highlight good practice.
Subsequently, the Regulator published a review of a selection of pension schemes’ annual climate reports, which has revealed several areas for improvement for schemes and some emerging good practice.
Some of the common areas for improvement across the scheme reports were a lack of sufficient background information on the scheme, disclosures of strategy and scenario analysis. There were also various accessibility issues that could make it difficult for savers and others to find and the reports online.
However, several reports contained examples of trustees taking appropriate action, including:
The Regulator sees climate change as continuing to pose a core financial risk to savers’ pensions for the foreseeable future, and it urges trustees in scope of the regulations to read the review and consider how they can improve their governance and reporting of climate-related risks and opportunities. Smaller schemes, not currently in scope, may also find the results of the review useful in improving their management of climate-related risk and opportunities.
Separately, the Society of Pension Professionals has updated its ESG guidance aimed at pension scheme trustees. The ESG Guide 2023 “aims to give a high-level overview…, including possible approaches for different investment structures, details of the underlying legal obligations and how to engage with investment managers and advisers”.
Issues covered in the guide include how the scheme’s investments are held and trustees' legal obligations. The guide also outlines a suggested approach/framework for trustees.
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This article first appeared in the September 2024 issue of Financier Worldwide.
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The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC Act) received Royal Assent on 24 May 2024 and is generally expected to come into force in autumn this year.
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On 26 July 2024, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) jointly released revised rules in respect of the investments into China’s financial market through the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor and Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (collectively, QFII) regime (the New Rules).
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