The Pension Insurance Corp. announced Tuesday that it had completed an annuity buy-in with the C. & J. Clark Pension Fund, the defined benefit plan of U.K.-based shoe retailer C. & J. Clark International Ltd. The buy-in will cover 540 million pounds ($676.93 million) of plan liabilities for a total of 8,000 members.
The buy-in is PIC’s second with Clarks Footwear; the two completed a 280-million-pound transaction in 2022. The latest transaction will insure all the plan’s remaining liabilities, which totaled 820 million pounds.
“We are pleased to achieve our long-standing ambition to fully buy-in the C&J Clark Pension Fund which is a major step in fully securing members’ benefits at the same time as eliminating pension related balance sheet volatility,” said Philip Yau, Clarks’ chief financial officer, in a statement.
The announcement is one of the first pension risk transfers in 2025, following a year of record PRT volume in the U.K. In the first half of 2024, 20 billion pounds of pension risk transfer buy-in and buyout transactions were recorded, according to Legal & General Retirement America. According to LGRA, the U.K. market could have reached 40 billion pounds in volume for all of 2024, for which data are not yet available.
Pension consultant Lane Clark & Peacock estimates the U.K. pension risk transfer market could see between 40 billion pounds and 50 billion pounds of annuity buy-in volume in 2025, which would mark the third consecutive year of such volume. The firm also expects more than 300 transactions to occur in 2025, which would be the most in a single year.
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Tags: Annuity Buy-in, Clarks Footwear Pension Fund, Pension Insurance Corporation, Pension Risk Transfer, Philip Yau, PRT