Just Retirement has bought a £95m chunk of FTSE 250 company Galliford Try’s defined benefit pension scheme.
The pension provider referred to the transaction as “the latest in a series of steps the pension scheme trustees have taken to reduce risk in their investment portfolio”.
The £95m portion represents 43 per cent of the scheme’s total £220m assets under management.
A spokesperson for housebuilding group Galliford Try said the decision to de-risk its liabilities was a “one-off thing”, adding it was “not a move to sell off the whole scheme”.
The spokesperson said that, at the time of the last valuation in 2013, the scheme recorded a “slight surplus”, but the reality was now the scheme had a “very slight deficit”.
Tim Coulson, director of defined benefit solutions at Just Retirement, said the process took eight weeks from the time the first quote was issued, to executing the final stage of the transaction.
He said: “This was only possible due to the disciplined approach from LCP and the trustees of the Galliford Try Pension Scheme.” he added.
Just Retirement first entered the DB de-risking market in 2013 and since then it has become the biggest part of its business.
In the nine months to March 2016, Just Retirement’s DB buy-ins and buy-outs added up to £744.2m, a 66 per cent increase on the corresponding period for the previous year.
In its 2015 annual report, Just Retirement projected the total bulk annuity market in the UK would rise to £25bn in 2020, up from £13.2bn in 2014.
Source: FT Adviser