Speakers
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Sammy Cooper-Smith - Rothesay Life Sammy is Co-Head of Business Development at Rothesay Life. His role is to lead the deal process, liaising with prospective clients and their advisers from the initial stages through execution. In this role Sammy has worked on a number of risk transfer processes including the reinsurance arrangement with Zurich and the £1.6bn buy-in with the CAA Pension Scheme among others. Sammy has been with Rothesay Life since they acquired Paternoster in 2010 and has worked in pension de-risking for 10 years, and annuities in general for 18 years.
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Matthew Cooper - PwC Matt has been advising on employer covenant in the Scottish market for the last 8 years in relation to covenant assessment, monitoring, affordability, transactions and restructuring. He provides advice on a variety of schemes with assets from £20m up to £20bn with employers in sectors ranging from financial services to utilities and from oil and gas to hi-tec manufacturing. Recent projects include advising on 'what-if' scenarios helping trustees understand what their employer covenant might look like in the future and consider actions they could take to protect the position of their scheme.
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Mark Jennings - PwC Mark leads PwC's regional Pensions Credit Advisory team in the “Northern Cluster”, focusing exclusively on employer covenant and pensions restructuring. Mark advises a number of trustee clients with a range of sponsor types and scheme structures - either to help them through a scheme funding process or assist with transactional situations. He has completed over 300 covenant assignments in recent years and acts as retained advisor to a number of our regional trustee clients.
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Andy McKinnell - Aon Hewitt Andy is an experienced pensions professional with strong investment and actuarial knowledge. Over a 30 year career he has advised on a wide range of asset and liability management issues, and he is well known and respected within the pensions industry, particularly in Scotland. He currently acts as the investment consultant to a number of pension funds ranging in size from around £50m to over £2.5bn.
Andy is also now taking on appointments in a personal capacity as an independent professional trustee. His skills and experience offer valuable insight to any board on which he serves, and he combines these with an ability to build strong relationships and work in partnership with other trustees and sponsors. He also retains a portfolio of investment advisory appointments with Aon Hewitt, working on a part-time basis.
Andy’s specific skills include expertise in Liability Driven Investment having developed Aon’s advisory capability in this area in 2006/07, and he has been at the forefront of the design of de-risking strategies for clients of the firm. More recently he has worked with clients on a range of alternative investment opportunities including infrastructure, other long-term inflation-linked opportunities, secured loans, and an innovative collateral switch transaction that enhanced index-linked gilt returns. Earlier in his career he advised on a variety of funding issues, including the impact of corporate restructures, liaison with the pensions regulator, benefit changes, as well as on scheme documentation and member communication.
