BCE has reached an agreement to transfer the longevity risk for $5 billion of pension plan liabilities to Sun Life Financial.
Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s recent announcement that it will purchase group annuity contracts for about 21,000 retirees representing US$2.5 billion in pension obligations is the latest indication that the trend to de-risk pension plans is continuing.
Kimberly-Clark has reached an agreement to transfer the pension obligations of about 21,000 American retirees to two insurers.
Pension plan sponsors have until Feb. 15, 2015, to provide comments to the Actuarial Standards Board about its recent proposal to update Canada’s current mortality table for pension funding valuation purposes.
The funded status of the typical U.S. corporate pension plan declined 4.9 percentage points to 82.4% in January as the interest rate that determines liabilities fell to an all-time low, says the BNY Mellon Investment Strategy and Solutions Group.
The Timken Company has entered into an agreement to purchase a group annuity that will reduce its gross pension liability by about US$600 million.
In the current low-yielding fixed income market, fund managers and plan sponsors are desperately looking for alternative strategies to wring the most they can from their investments simply to meet funding objectives.
The accounting deficit of DB pension schemes for the United Kingdom’s largest 350 companies has nearly doubled in the past year.
The pension funded status of the largest corporate sponsors in the United States dropped in 2014 as falling interest rates and the impact of new mortality tables partially offset strong returns on pension plan assets.
The solvency of Canadian DB plans declined through 2014 due to a decrease in long-term interest rates.