IMPROVING TISA’S STRATEGIC, POLICY AND TECHNICAL FOCUS
We are steadily building and refining TISA’s strategic capability, policy development resource and technical support service to ensure that we are best placed to meet our objective to ‘improve the financial wellbeing of UK consumers by aligning the interests of people, the financial services industry and the UK economy’.
This year we have made significant additions to the TISA team with the appointments of Andrew Churchill as Digital Innovation Director, Stephen Gay as Policy Team Manager and Renny Biggins as Pensions Technical Officer. You can read more about these appointments here:
http://www.tisa.uk.com/releases.html?release_id=772
http://www.tisa.uk.com/releases.html?release_id=766
At the same time, through our ongoing Development Programme, we are building a framework to ensure we continue to deliver the evidence based thought leadership that we are increasingly acclaimed for. We have established the TISA Strategy Committee to provide us with strategic oversight and to take on responsibility for the working groups from the highly successful Savings & Investments Policy Project. And we are re-invigorating our Policy Councils. We recently announced the establishment of the Consumer Engagement Policy Council – based on the merger of the Distribution and Wrap & Platform councils.
http://www.tisa.uk.com/council.html?council_id=60
This has given us the opportunity to look at roles and responsibilities within the TISA team to ensure our resources are focused on the right areas. Retirement saving is a crucial topic and we will be developing thought leadership on the review of automatic enrolment, self-employed pensions and a host of related pension issues. We have therefore decided to change Adrian Boulding’s role to focus solely on this and he is now our Director of Retirement. Together with Renny’s appointment this will enable TISA to provide members with policy and technical support and allow us to drive forward the wider debate on retirement.
It’s also important that we align the work of the TISA Strategy Committee and the Policy Councils to ensure that we work collaboratively on strategic and technical policy development, forming cross Council working groups where appropriate, and so our wider strategy work will now be headed up by Charles McCready as Strategic Policy Director.
Jeffrey Mushens will continue to lead our highly commended technical work in his role as Technical Policy Director while Carol Knight, in addition to her role as TISA’s Chief Operations Officer, will be the executive lead person on the Children’s Savings Policy Council. Many of you will know Peter Smith, he is a recognised industry figure and we have asked him to expand on this in a new role – Head of Industry Liaison – focusing predominantly on distribution and the growing interaction with technological innovation and FinTech. You can expect to see more of Peter at industry events, presenting on TISA’s policy work.
Our policy team executive line-up is therefore now:
• Charles McCready – Strategic Policy Director
• Carol Knight – Chief Operations Officer
• Adrian Boulding – Director of Retirement
• Andrew Churchill – Digital Innovation Director
• Jeffrey Mushens – Technical Policy Director
• Peter Smith – Head of Industry Liaison.
I will continue to be the TISA lead on Brexit, presenting our Brexit Steering Committee recommendations on savings and investments to HM Treasury and liaising with industry groups and City UK.
We are making real progress in a number of policy areas – the recent announcement by HM Treasury to change the definition of advice to make guidance available to a greater number of consumers is an excellent example of where our voice has been heard. I am confident that with your continued involvement and support the changes we are making will enable us to be even more effective.
David Dalton-Brown
Director General