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There are 180,000 lay trustees of pension schemes in Ireland and there is, currently, no legal requirement for them to hold a qualification relevant to pension management – quite the anomaly in a heavily-regulated environment.
President of the IIPM Rose Leonard said the organisation is launching this service now because the amount of money that is involved in pension schemes and it felt it was appropriate to do so.
Ms Leonard said there is currently around €100bn of assets in roughly 60,000 pension schemes in Ireland.
She said “there are thousands of qualifications on the national framework of qualifications but none for trustees at the moment.”
Ms Leonard expects take-up of the course to be strong and that most trustees “operate in the right mindset”.
She said: “What this is about is helping them to become better trustees … to understand the business environment in which they’re operating.”
She also outlined the responsibilities of pension scheme trustees, which include appropriately investing member money, disclosure of information, payments, and proper record keeping.
