Pension Insurance Corporation (PIC) has completed a £200m buy-in of 3i Group’s retirement scheme.
The deal covers around 40% of the private equity investor’s retirement scheme’s liabilities for pensions in payment.
Trustee chair Carol Woodley described the deal as the next logical step in the scheme’s long-term de-risking plan. “The plan has been de-risking for a number of years, primarily by moving our asset mix to favour index-linked gilts.”
She added that PIC was chosen for its expertise in dealing with complex projects such as this.
PIC’s head of origination structuring, Uzma Nazir, praised 3i’s trustees for having a well-developed de-risking plan in place.
“As part of this strategy, the trustees have been increasing the proportion of the plan’s assets invested in bonds over time,” Nazir added. “This strategy has proved to be the right one and the trustees have now been able to de-risk a significant proportion of the liabilities.”
This is the latest in a series of buy-ins led by PIC, which has seen it insure schemes for telecommunications equipment specialist Alcatel-Lucent and Civil Aviation. At the end of 2016, PIC’s investments totalled £22.6bn and it had insured almost 135,000 retirement scheme members.
