Dalriada routinely provides pension scheme secretary services both as a standalone and bundled service alongside our trusteeship services. We can provide a core service or encompass specific additional responsibilities, such as liaising with the scheme actuary and external third parties, as required. We can also provide general guidance on regulatory and legislative compliance to a best-practice standard and help in structuring meetings more effectively.
We see the core secretarial service to be provided to the scheme as comprising:
- Attendance at the trustee meetings over the course of a year.
- Preparation and circulation of trustee meeting agendas and papers in advance of the meeting.
- Drafting and circulating trustee minutes and action points following the meeting.
When providing a scheme secretary Dalriada looks for an individual with both a full working knowledge of pensions and the ability to perform the required secretarial functions. We feel this is important to ensure that the scheme secretary can operate with minimum external input, and can minute challenging meetings with detailed specialist content.
These core secretarial services could be extended, for example as follows:
- Maintaining governance documentation and standards. This ensures that there is a single person clearly responsible for co-ordinating and managing regulatory and legislative compliance on governance matters, which minimises the risk of particular issues falling between advisers, or between the advisers and trustees.
- Working collaboratively with a range of advisers. Managing the relationships across a broad range of advisers.
- Effective challenge of advisers. The Pensions Regulator expects trustees to provide effective challenge to advisers, where appropriate, and to test the advice provided. A professional Scheme Secretary can assist the trustees in providing such challenge.
- Assisting in the management of potential conflicts of interests. A key aspect of governance is the identification and management of potential conflicts of interest.
- Filling knowledge gaps. An experienced and professional scheme secretary can complement the existing skillset and knowledge base of the current trustees.
- Focussed and specific advice. It is important to ensure that instructions to advisers are clear and concise so that the resultant advice is focused and specific and addresses the trustee requirements. Failure to do this can result in cost and time inefficiencies.
- Trustee Knowledge and Understanding. A professional scheme secretary can help identify, co-ordinate and manage training and development needs to assist the trustees to comply with their Trustee Knowledge and Understanding obligations.
If you’re interested in our pension scheme secretary services, please get in touch using the contact form or speak directly to one of our team who will be able to help.
