The UK Pension Protection Fund (PPF) was established in April 2005 to protect the pensions of members of UK private sector defined benefit pension schemes which have insufficient assets and whose corporate sponsor fails. The Fund takes over the pension scheme assets and assumes responsibility for the payment of compensation to the former members of the scheme. The PPF is funded by a levy on the population of eligible schemes. This paper discusses the application of Enterprise Risk Management principles and techniques to the unique situation of the PPF. The elements of the financial management of the Fund have been developed by reference to practice within proprietary insurance institutions and within pension funds. The paper will be of interest and, we hope, of some value to students, researchers and analysts and also to the PPF's own stakeholder groups that have a stake in an effective pension protection regime.

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This paper describes how the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) in the U.K. quantifies and prices the risks it carries. It also discusses how the PPF interprets these outcomes in terms of a levy or premium to be charged to the pension plans that it protects. PPF has existed since 2005: it has experienced rapid growth as a consequence of the failure of U.K. pension scheme sponsors and the persistent underfunding of their plans, and it has withstood the global financial crisis, partly due to the Fund's ability to charge a levy consistent with the risks it faces and its skill in securing stakeholder acceptance of its process. Considering the example of the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the PPF was able to introduce the world's first riskbased pension protection levy, a key step in winning stakeholder support for the pricing mechanism; the components of the levy-setting process are described in this paper. We examine the PPF's goal to be selfsufficient by 2030. We also review the framework whereby investment and levy strategies can be evaluated in the context of the PPF's long-term objectives, and we describe the internal model at high level to compute measures of success of different strategies. The Board has been able to use this framework to assess the impact of a change to the basis of indexation of PPF compensation, the cost of removing its compensation cap, and the effect of a potential change in pension scheme funding valuations to permit smoothing of discount rates.

In April of 2013, the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania convened a Technical Review Panel, comprising ten experts whose task it was to review the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation's (PBGC) Pension Insurance Modeling System (PIMS), including inputs, outputs, and model assumptions. The review was intended to provide a formal evaluation of the technical adequacy of the model by outside experts. Each expert participating on the Technical Panel was asked to review background material (see References) and focus on a particular aspect of the PIMS model. The list of panelists and topics was developed by the Council in discussion with the Social Security Administration (SSA). This report and the appended papers herein from our Technical Panel comprise the Final Report under this project. The Panel's key findings may be summarized as follows: (1) The PIMS models are an important and valuable tool in modeling the Agency's liability risk. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other model that can do a comparable job. (2) Nevertheless, some improvements could be integrated in the Agency's approach to modeling. Those deserving highest priority attention in the experts' view are the following: (a) Incorporating systematic mortality risk (i.e., treat mortality and longevity as stochastic variables); (b) Including new asset classes increasingly found in defined benefit plan portfolios (e.g., commercial real estate, private equity funds, infrastructure, hedge funds, and others); (c) Developing a more complex model for the term structure of interest rates; and (d) Incorporating an option value approach to pricing the insurance provided. (3) The Agency could also do more to communicate the range of uncertainty and potential for problems associated with the PBGC's financial status. This could include additional information including the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR), and perhaps an 'intermediate,' 'optimistic,' and 'pessimistic' set of projected outcomes, as well as the expected 'date of exhaustion' for assets backing pension benefits insured by the PBGC.