PMI London Business Meeting - Pensions Fraud

The PMI London Region Group is delighted to invite you to our next Business Meeting on 19 October. It will be our first fully in-person event in over two years and we are delighted to have secured a great panel lined up for what promises to be a fascinating discussion focusing on the issue of pensions fraud.

Date - Wednesday 19 October 2022

Time - 17:00 - 18:30

Venue - CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang LLP, Cannon Place, 78 Cannon Street, London EC4N 6AF

Fraud in relation to pension schemes represents a very real and present threat for members. It is a topic that is often in the pensions press and recent legislative changes have been introduced with the intention of making transfers to scam vehicles harder. But the reality is that, for all the public statements, it is often difficult for trustees and practitioners to know just how prevalent the issue of pensions fraud is and what the industry is doing to combat the issue.

We are delighted to be joined by Ian Bell, Head of Pensions at RSM, Sheila Pancholi, partner at RSM and national Technology Risk Assurance lead, Andy Cassin from Willis Towers Watson and a member of the PASA Cybercrime & Fraud Working Group and James Collins, Senior Legal Counsel at The Pensions Ombudsman.

The panel will explore:

• what schemes are doing (or could be doing better) to manage the risk of pensions fraud from a risk management perspective,

• what pension scheme administrators are seeing 'at the coal-face' in terms of fraudulent activity,

• dealing with the consequences of scams and fraud,

• what are the key risks for pension schemes when it comes to the cyber threat and what can be done to mitigate these risks.

A bit more about our speakers:

Sheila Pancholi, RSM

Sheila is a Partner and the RSM UK national Technology Risk Assurance lead. Sheila has over 27 years’ experience in cyber security, data privacy and operational resilience, and works across a variety of sectors and markets, from large global corporates to middle market clients. Throughout her career Sheila has undertaken industry secondments and Head of Internal Audit and Risk roles. She is also the Chair for RSM’s global cyber task force which includes representation from a number of RSM International member firms. She is regularly a speaker at industry events on the subject of cyber security, and has written many articles and good practice guides on managing cyber risks and protecting data.

Over the last 5 years Sheila has worked with many pension scheme Managers and Trustees delivering education and awareness sessions on cyber risk management and data privacy, including live incident management desktop scenarios. Sheila’s team of cyber specialists have been working closely with Pension Schemes to provide independent assurance over the Scheme’s cyber and data footprint and how member data is safeguarded across the Scheme’s supply chain, including Administrators and Actuaries. This has helped the Schemes to determine where there could be weaknesses in controls or processes that need to be remediated to safeguard the organisation from a successful cyber-attack.

Ian Bell, Partner, RSM

Ian is Head of Pensions at RSM. Ian leads a national team responsible for over 400 pension scheme clients. Ian has over 30 years' experience of pension scheme audit and advisory and is currently responsible for some of RSM’s largest pension scheme audits, several with assets exceeding £1bn.

Ian holds the Retirement Provision Certificate with the Pensions Management Institute and has passed all modules in the Pensions Regulator toolkit. He was instrumental in the design of RSM’s suite of advisory and risk management toolkits for pension scheme trustees, together with our governance benchmarking tool. Ian has led our fraud awareness program for pension scheme trustees and is a regular speaker at industry events on fraud and governance matters. He is also an independent Trustee for a defined benefit scheme.

Andy Cassin, WTW

Andy has been with WTW for 32 years, starting as a mainframe systems programmer and moving into other operational IT roles, then, becoming involved in the developing area of Information Security. Andy spent more than 20 years with responsibility for aspects of security, firstly in Corporate IT and then as part of the Global Information Security team. In 2017 Andy was recruited into WTW’s Pensions Administration line of business to work within the Quality Standards team providing support on data privacy and related areas.

James Collins, Senior Legal Counsel, The Pensions Ombudsman

James Collins has worked as an In-House Lawyer at The Pensions Ombudsman since October 2014 and is now Senior Counsel. Originally called to the Bar in 2005, he is currently a Practicing Solicitor with Higher Rights of Audience in both criminal and civil courts. James has been the lead lawyer on pension scam cases at the Pensions Ombudsman since joining, and has run the Legal Team section of the Ombudsman’s new Pensions Dishonesty Unit, since its inception in 2021. James was formerly in private practice as a criminal defence solicitor, and before that worked as a Magistrates Court Legal Adviser and a Senior Adjudicator at two other ombudsman services.

We look forward to seeing you there for what promises to be an extremely interesting and topical discussion. We hope you will join us after the seminar for networking drinks.

Best wishes

PMI London Group Business Meetings