The benefits of loading your scheme documents onto Perspective include:
- Resolving the governance issue of maintaining an accurate set of scheme documents, in a central location, which do not get lost.
- Consolidation will generally no longer be required or be advisable as “Time Travel”, effectively deals with amendments.
- The ease with which the documents can be accessed, and navigated by staff generally and particularly by those who are not familiar with them, facilitates handing down scheme knowledge to new staff.
- It will be much less time consuming to consult scheme rules and other documents when issues arise and therefore scheme managers, lawyers and consultants are likely to do it more often, improving and speeding up decision making.
- Drafting is improved and made faster, if lawyers have access.
- All the features of Perspective that are appropriate to the documents, for example those that apply to legislation, will be available. The main features of Perspective are:
- “Time Travel” – the ability to view the documents as in force at any date in the past with the option of clearly marking any changes;
- Searching – powerful and easy to use search engine;
- Favourites – your own list of favourite documents and places in them for quick access is easy to create and use;
- Annotations – the ability to add your own notes to your documents;
- Definitions – full linking of all defined terms back to their definitions;
- Hypertext Linking – within documents, between them, to other documents on Perspective and even to the internet;
- Document Notes – such as amendment notes are included and easily accessed.
After this exercise, dealing with amending deeds and additional deeds or documents is much cheaper and so keeping your documents up to date is simple. The documents on Perspective would only be available to you and those to whom you gave permission.
For over 20 years Pendragon has been working with Railpen, helping them maintain their scheme rules. Gary Collinson, of Railpen, explains how.
Railpen is responsible for the day-to-day administration of one of the UK’s largest occupational pension schemes, the Railways Pension Scheme along with other rail and non-rail schemes.
The Railways Pension Scheme is an industry-wide scheme with over 100
sections for non-associated employers. Each has its own set of rules with increasing divergence from the original Shared Cost Arrangement, from which the rules were derived, and from each other.
Each section’s rulebook is stored and maintained in one place on Perspective, Pendragon’s legal and regulatory information service.
This gives us access to a comprehensive collection of legislation and pensions related information along with access to each section’s rules, which we can view at any point in time with the benefit of Perspective’s Time Travel feature.
Furthermore, all defined terms are linked back to their definitions and links cross referencing between documents are easy to use.
In addition to us as Administrator, we have been able to make the rules available through Perspective to scheme members, sponsoring employers, Trustees and our legal and actuarial advisers.
