Legal & General Retail Retirement has acquired a 100% stake in Finovation Limited, a company specialising in pension pot tracing and consolidation.

L&G this morning said the acquisition of Finovation, which trades as MyFutureNow, would support its defined contribution (DC) and retail retirement businesses by enabling it to provide customers with a view of their pension and retirement savings, including individual pots, workplace savings and their underlying investment assets.

The acquisition comes a few months after the UK government presented the framework for its own initiative on pensions “dashboards” – digital tools intended to give individuals an overview of all their pension savings in one place.

Chris Knight, CEO of Legal & General Retail Retirement, said L&G fully supported the government’s pension dashboard initiative, “but the reality is that it may be years before full coverage is realised”.

According to a statement from L&G, MyFutureNow uses basic personal data and employment details plus “provider knowledge” to trace pension pots and provide updated details to customers. It could be used as a tracing service or as a way of creating a single ‘dashboard’ view of an individual’s pension savings portfolio.

Emma Byron, managing director, Legal & General Retail Retirement Income, said L&G intended to make the new platform available through its DC business in the fourth quarter of this year, before launching it directly to consumers through its Retirement Income business in the first quarter of 2020.

L&G said it would offer the MyFutureNow platform to its customers of retirement age but that it could also offer the service to working age customers. 

LGPS Central turns to KAS Bank for cost transparency assistance

LGPS Central, one of the UK’s eight local authority asset pools, will be using KAS Bank to help it with collecting and reporting cost information. 

The pooling vehicle will use KAS Bank to help it with collecting cost information across its range of investment mandates for pooled assets and those employed by its partner funds, according to a statement. A cost report to be generated by KAS Bank would be accessible to the LGPS Central team as well as its partner funds.

The integrity and security of the cost data would be an important area of focus.

Mike Weston, chief executive at LGPS Central Limited, said: “We are committed to being as transparent as possible about investment costs with our clients. We’re delighted to be working with KAS BANK and are looking forward to shining even more light on costs – one of the key benefits of the pooling process.”

LGPS Central is the pooling vehicle for nine Midlands-based local government pension scheme (LGPS) pension funds with around £45bn (€48.6bn) of assets between them. LGPS Central is currently responsible for managing around £20bn of the assets.

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