Independent Trustee Limited

Welcome to the website of Independent Trustee Services Ltd

There are many reasons for appointing an independent trustee, and nearly as many models of independent trusteeship. Some of the relevant issues are explored in the “So You Think You Want An Independent Trustee” article to the right.

Deciding to have an independent trustee is the first step. Selecting the right independent trustee is the second, and we hope that this site will help explain what differentiates us from our competitors, and give good reason to consider choosing Independent Trustee Services (ITS). Our industry peers have recognised the work that we do, with “Independent Trustee of the Year” awards in four consecutive years, most recently at the 2011 Engaged Investor awards.

Our work on the Uniq pension scheme attracted a lot of attention in early 2011 with the deficit for equity swap. We are now delighted to announce that the Trustee of the Uniq scheme has recently entered into an £830m buy in deal with Rothesay Life. A copy of Rothesay Life’s press release can be found to the left.

Our Directors have been busy with pen in hand of late, with two recent articles now available on the left hand side of this page. Recovery, the magazine of R3, the Association of Business Recovery Professionals recently published an article co-authored by Chris Martin and Martine-Trouard-Riolle about pension scheme issues in corporate restructuring, which concentrated on our experiences with the Uniq and HMV pension schemes. Secondly is Richard Boniface’s article “Challenges for Smaller Pension Schemes” that appeared in auditor Ash Shaw’s recent newsletter.

Independent trusteeship is all we do, and we are appointed to a complete cross section of pension schemes - Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution, large and small. Leaving the headline cases aside, most of our appointments are to well run schemes that simply want the extra expertise to help with best practice governance. Many of these are looking at ways of reducing liabilities and / or risk, while we also act as a sole trustee to an increasing number of schemes where trustee recruitment and conflicts of interest are live issues. We also have extensive experience of successfully managing schemes through the Pension Protection Fund assessment period, transferring 10 schemes in 2010 alone.

For an informal discussion on how ITS may be able to help you, please contact us.