Jon Spain Email & Phone Number

Formerly a pensions actuary at GAD until April 2018 (Duncan C Fraser and Clay & Partners were my main previous firms), I have now switched to other things. In February 2018, I became Treasurer of Law For Life, a fascinating organisation, with which I am proud to be associated. Since then, I have also become Treasurer of Advocacy In Barnet and HelpLines Partnership. Discrate.com (see below) has just been updated until the end of 2019 as has ukrpi.com (longequityreturns.com has still only been updated until the end of 2018). My personal submission to TPR's 2020 DB Pension Schemes consultation was lodged on 31 August 2020 and is available on jonspain.com.A long-standing personal interest is trying to persuade people that marking to market is not a sensible way of planning for the long-term future. The idea that "today tells you everything you need to know about the future" is simply not credible. Like {qx} and other similar odd symbols, the discount rate is part of the actuarial DNA. However, despite using it for a very long time, we understand very little about how to select it for long-term entities (in principle as opposed to regulations). Even worse, discounting hides information and lends an air of spurious accuracy, which is not at all deserved. In my view, for entities which truly can be described as "long-term", smoothing works better than mark-to-market. Even better, robustly based stochastic projections provide much more information (see discrate.com).Over the last few years, I've taken this topic to a number of actuarial gatherings, including 7 during 2019; there is now a slide deck on discrate.com. In May 2017, I submitted a personal submission to DWP's consultation on DB pension schemes (see jonspain.com). As mentioned above, I have also lodged a personal submission to TPR's 2020 DB Schemes consultation.

Listed skills include Project Planning, Pensions, Risk Management, Investments, and 16 others.