Our Investment Proposition
Workplace savings
We offer a range of fully-governed and flexible investment choices to suit your clients’ different workplace pension needs:
- Default options
- Alternative lifestyle options
- Self-select funds
Depending on how engaged and confident an employee is, they can elect to stay in the default option selected by you and your client, they can choose to move into one of our alternative lifestyle options or they can be more hands-on and choose from the range of self-select funds available to their scheme.
We provide information for employees who want to move from lifestyles to self-select funds to help them decide whether it’s the right decision, helping to protect their retirement outcomes.
Our lifestyle options
Available as defaults or alternative lifestyle options, our Lifetime Investment suite is innovative, fully-governed and flexible. It’s designed to maximise growth potential to support sustainable income in retirement by investing in a range of assets via best-in-class managers with responsible investment fitted as standard. It offers employees several paths with different levels of risk and targets different ways to take their pension in later life.
The suite comprises:
- Lifetime Investment – offers exposure to a range of publicly-traded assets
- Lifetime Investment Plus – also invests around 11% in private market assets to provide further diversification and with the aim of boosting returns for an additional cost
- Lifetime Investment Extra – invests around 23% in private market assets and has the highest potential for growth of the three options for the highest cost. This option is currently only available to Scottish Widows Master Trust members.
More information can be found in our Scottish Widows Lifetime Investment adviser and employer guide (PDF, 1MB) and our approach to private market investing guide (PDF, 472KB).
Self-select fund range
We offer a choice of investment solutions for members that are confident enough to select their own investments.
Our fund range covers key asset classes, geographical locations, sectors and management styles. It includes funds from well–established external fund managers to complement our internally managed funds.
Investing responsibly
We believe environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors can be financially material and impact corporate profitability and, therefore, investment portfolios. We exclude certain companies from our investments and tilt away from others to reduce exposure to risks such as stranded assets and help safeguard members’ pension savings in the longer term. But we’re also looking for upside potential from tilting towards companies with better ESG credentials and those transitioning their businesses to a low carbon economy to provide growth and profit opportunities. We’ve partnered with leaders in sustainable investing to help deliver our responsible investment approach.
Find out more about responsible investment policies and approaches
Enhancements to our Pension Investment Approaches
Scottish Widows Pension Investment Approaches (PIAs) are our established pension lifestyle options which have been delivering strong results for members since launch in 2006. We’re currently making changes to the PIAs which we believe will enhance our ability to maximise growth potential to better help employees achieve their retirement goals. These enhancements will gradually align the PIAs to our Scottish Widows Lifetime Investment.
You can find out more about PIA evolution in our guide (PDF, 1MB)
We’ve created dedicated infosites for members to help them understand the changes and where they are on the evolution journey: