There are 180,000 lay trustees of pension schemes in Ireland and there is, currently, no legal requirement for them to hold a qualification relevant to pension management - quite the anomaly in a heavily-regulated environment.
The Irish Institute of Pension Management (IIPM) is now offering a professional accreditation course in a bid to change that and improve the skill and knowledge bases of the country's pension trustees.
President of the IIPM Rose Leonard said the organisation is launching this service now because the amount of money that if involved in pension schemes and it felt it was appropriate to do so.
Ms Leonard said is currently around €100bn of assets in roughly 60,000 pension schemes in Ireland.
She said “there are thousands of qualifications on the national framework of qualifications but none for trustees at the moment.”
Ms Leonard expects take-up of the course to be strong and that most trustees “operate in the right mindset”.
She said: “What this is about is helping them to become better trustees ... to understand the business environment in which they’re operating.”
She also outlined the responsibilities of pension scheme trustees, which include appropriately investing member money, disclosure of information, payments, and proper record keeping.
Ms Leonard said many of these roles are currently outsourced by trustees.
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MORNING BRIEFS - Limerick software company Kneat has secured a €5.5m investment from Canadian firm Fortune Bay which it plans to use to expand, in the course of which it will hire 30 new staff.
Kneat provides software to companies in the life sciences and healthcare sectors and other industries which are heavily regulated and require extensive retention and management of documents.
The investment will create a new software company listed on the stock market in Canada.
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Newspaper sales are still falling according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures but the rate of decline slowed over the second half of last year.
Daily paper sales were down 4.2% and Sunday sales 6.5% between July and December.
The year-on-year rate of decline over the first half of last year was 5.4% in the daily market and 7.8% for Sundays.
The Irish Independent and Sunday Independent remain the highest selling daily and Sunday newspapers. The Irish Daily Mail was the only paper to record an increase in circulation though its sister title, the Irish Mail on Sunday, was down more than 9%.
