Simplifying retirement – with Heather Coulson, head of portfolio management at Scottish Widows

Heather Coulson, head of portfolio management and implementation at Scottish Widows, is the latest guest on The Professional Investment Podcast. She chose Professional Pensions’ story about DC scheme savers lacking information to make retirement decisions as her news story of the week.

It’s not surprising scheme members are flummoxed about retirement. Managing your investment and longevity risk as an individual is a complex undertaking. Given these challenges, the government now requires schemes to provide a default retirement income.

Heather said one of the key challenges facing providers is the lack of information about each member’s other pension pots and financial circumstances. The pension dashboard should give providers more information about members’ different pots.

We discussed how AI and improved technology will make it easier for providers to personalise pensions. This will help the schemes to have more information about their members and better able to offer them the retirement income product.

Heather discussed how Scottish Widows is expanding its investment universe by adding private market assets to their portfolios via a LTAF.

There are two different types of private asset investment – one for building wealth and one for retirement. The proportion invested in each varies during the lifetime of a member.

Scottish Widows is also exploring a broad variety of different fixed income investments for this part of the member’s journey.

And the provider is thinking of how it can work with its Lloyds Banking parent to include financing small businesses in its investment universe. This coupled with venture capital and private equity financing would help British businesses to grow .

Finally, Heather talked about what Scottish Widows looks for when working with third-party asset managers. She explained how vital it was to have a partner who you trusted and would pull out the stops when needed.

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ABOUT THE GUEST:

Heather joined Scottish Widows Investment Office in February 2024. As Head of Portfolio Management & Implementation, Heather is responsible for the management of £170bn of policyholder funds and the selection, governance, and oversight of asset managers.

Heather was previously Head of Global Asset Allocation at Aberdeen, with more than a decade spent as a multi-asset manager focused on institutional mandates including bespoke solutions. Prior to her time spent in multi-asset, Heather was fixed income credit analyst at SWIP and an equity analyst at Baillie Gifford where she started her career.

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ABOUT THE HOST:

Charlotte Moore is an award-winning journalist and co-founder of Moore Squared Communications. She has spent almost two decades writing about how the UK’s largest investment organisations allocate their capital for a number of different specialist magazines including Professional Pensions, IPE and MandateWire. She started this podcast to increase understanding of how and why the UK’s £3 trillion pensions industry invests its members’ capital to provide the best possible retirement.

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