Conference Topics

Global common goals:

While the architecture of pension funds and of personal and retirement savings is unique to each global jurisdiction, we believe that there are emerging policies, best practices and technologies that can adapted in pursuit of common goals:

  • Providing financial security for a dignified retirement.
  • Generating investment liquidity for public stock and bond markets and for private market investments, infrastructure and general economic development.
  • Ameliorating income and wealth inequality which is a growing worldwide problem.
  • Facilitating work force flexibility and labor mobility.
  • Helping middle class workers establish and build wealth that is invested in real assets, can be used at the discretion of the worker/owner and inheritable by heirs.

Topics of discussion:

  • Fireside Chat: Bob Reynolds, President and CEO, Putnam Investments – DC Savings is the Key to Global Economic Growth
  • Conversation: Global Lessons from the World’s Largest DC Plan
  • Universal Workplace Savings (UWS): Voluntary, Mandatory and Hybrid
  • Retirement Finance Heat Map: The “Global DC Opportunity Database”
  • Will Europe Embrace Defined Contribution Savings?
  • Trust: Global DC is Being Tested by a Mid-Life Crisis
  • Innovation (1): Plan Design, Record-Keeping, Best Practice
  • Innovation (2) Asset Management, Investment Products, Allocation Strategies
  • Innovation (3): Policy, Politics and Regulation
  • Global Aging and Lifetime Income: How Should Global DC Systems Cope?

With demographic aging, below-trend economic growth, lingering low interest rates, new technologies and a more dynamic environment for investment and employment, the sustainability of traditional defined benefit (DB) pension funds is being closely examined around the world.

In many jurisdictions, the establishment of personally-owned defined contribution (DC) investment plans are augmenting and supplanting membership in defined benefit pension funds. DC investment assets under management are rising rapidly in multiple markets.

We believe that there is much that we can call learn from creative programs being developed around the world; policy innovation, expertise and technological excellence are truly global assets that we all can share.