Royal London has increased the target equity allocation for younger customers within the growth stage of all target lifestyle strategies.

The group announced the change as part of its work to enhance its target lifestyle strategies, including its default solution, with the aim of delivering improved retirement outcomes for members. The enhancement has been made to the portfolios of all customers who are invested in one of Royal London's target lifestyle strategies and are more than 10 years from retirement. As a result, the overall proportion of growth assets in the default investment solution, Royal London Balanced Lifestyle Strategy (Drawdown), will increase from 82.5 per cent to 92.5 per cent. 
 
Scottish Widows has launched a new range of Managed Growth Funds (MGFs) to help customers support their long-term investment goals.

Developed to meet an increasing demand for simple, low-cost, ‘portfolio in a box’ solutions, Scottish Widows suggested that the range sets a new benchmark for value with a range of risk-rated portfolios at an OCF of 0.10 per cent. The five risk-rated funds, available initially on the Scottish Widows Platform, have been designed to deliver capital growth by investing in a wide range of assets. The MGFs are also available from Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland via the ‘ready made investment’ offering or blended with any of the diverse investment options on the Scottish Widows adviser platform.

XPS Group has announced that its illiquid asset trading solution has surpassed the £330m deal milestone.

Last month saw its dedicated solution, XPS Xchange, supporting on two key transactions, a purchase and a sale, as Dalriada Trustees completed the sale of a private equity holding, and a separate scheme complete the purchase of a private credit portfolio. This comes amid the continued growth of the secondary market for trading illiquid assets as pension schemes seek to unlock value and enhance returns.

Enplan, operated by Entrust and Schroders, has reached a "major milestone", with more than £500m in assets now managed by Schroders across the defined benefit (DB) pension consolidation platform.
 
Schroders now manages the assets of 10 Enplan schemes, around 18 months since it entered into a partnership to provide Enplan’s DB clients with sophisticated investment solutions previously only available to larger schemes. Enplan was launched in 2017 by professional independent trustee Entrust in collaboration with Isio to provide a ‘one-stop-shop’ platform for DB schemes. In total, it now manages more than £1bn in DB pension assets for over 60 schemes.

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