Pensions & benefits
Employer covenant consulting
Pragmatic and focussed advice from market-leading covenant and regulatory experts, helping you to make the best decisions around risk.
Understanding prospects for sponsors and how much reliance DB schemes can place on the employer covenant can be challenging in today’s uncertain world.
We offer tailored advice to schemes of all sizes, their sponsors, investors and lenders, focussed on understanding the key financial and non-financial risks facing the sponsor, and how these interact with the risks facing the scheme. The support we provide helps you make better strategic decisions across your scheme’s journey plan.
Our award-winning covenant consulting team enhances trustee and corporate approaches to DB schemes by analysing a sponsor’s financial performance, position and prospects.
We are experts in assessing business and sector-specific information and explaining it in simple and actionable terms, empowering you to make effective decisions.
Working within a pensions consultancy, we take a bigger picture perspective when providing advice, with a heavy focus on how our reporting can contribute to an effective integrated risk strategy. We focus our work on financial and non-financial indicators including longer term sector trends. Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and sustainability risk assessments come as standard in our advice and we utilise the innovative technology we have developed to drive engagement around key issues (for example Beacon – our intuitive climate risk review tool).
Our covenant assessments for triennial valuations help you set your funding and investment strategies. Sponsor strength can also change quickly, triggered by a range of events such as fluctuations in trading performance, changing market dynamics or matters impacting upon the economic environment more generally. We therefore provide tailored covenant monitoring to fit with your requirements, ranging from media monitoring to preparing periodic integrated financial updates. As well as trustee advisory work, we assist many sponsors in understanding their DB risk to help solve their pension problems. Working for both trustees and sponsors really helps us to see both sides of the story and ultimately achieve outcomes which work for both stakeholders.
We are also specialists in providing covenant advice when corporate transactions occur, to help our trustee clients negotiate any necessary mitigation and to help our corporate, investor and lender clients navigate the risks created by the Pension Schemes Act 2021.
Moving from a traditional employer covenant to an insurer covenant via a buy-in or buy-out can also be a big change for a scheme’s security, and we are market leaders at guiding key stakeholders via our Insurer Financial Risk Review service, as well as helping trustees to understand how the strength of an insurer or superfund compares to their existing covenant support.